One of the most anticipated wooden roller coasters to open in the United States in recent years is just a half a days’ drive from Kansas City. In mid-March, Silver Dollar City unleashed the 2nd fastest wooden roller coaster ride in the world. The new Outlaw Run wood coaster tops 68 miles an hour. Only one other wooden coaster in Germany goes faster, at 70-miles an hour.
But that’s not all. Silver Dollar City is pushing the limits on what a wooden coaster can do but modern technology is making the conceptual now a reality. The ride takes about a minute and a half and from the time you top the big hill to the end, this thrills never stop. Your car takes you up 107 feet and with the help of the surrounding landscape drops you back down 162 feet. It’s the steepest decent you will find on any wood coaster at 81-degrees. It feels like you are going straight down. Ride in the back to experience more of what feels like weightlessness. In fact, there nine places along the ride where you will feel like you are floating on air. On top of that, once the coaster is screaming along the half mile of track, you will do things you can’t do in any other wooden coaster anywhere else in the world. You will experience a record-breaking 3 inversions, with a 720-degree (double) barrel roll and a 153-degree outside banked turn. Once the ride is over, the feeling of surviving this exciting ride will make you want to ride it again.
Worried about safety? S-D-C says relax, Outlaw Run has a state of the art restraint and suspension systems and each car went around the track 300 times before the ride opened. Coaster experts say because this is really a next generation wood coaster, you will be surprised by the smoothness of the ride.
Silver Dollar City spent 10.8 million dollars to build Outlaw Run. An investment the park hopes that will attract an additional 85-thousand visitors this year alone.