Taron

Visited Phantasialand yesterday with some friends, and while we cunningly selected the first Monday after the Easter holidays for our visit, we failed to realize that schoolchildren in the Netherlands still had a holiday week left. And the park was flooded with Dutch parents and children. Behind and in front of you in long waiting lines, all you heard was Dutch. Next time, we'll be more careful about this. While it didn't outright ruin our day, we spent a lot more time waiting in line instead of actually riding roller coasters.

What we have here is the newest attraction of the park, inaugurated less than a year ago: Taron, a multi launch coaster built by Intamin. It's the fastest one of its kind (which means that there are much faster single launch coasters) and also has the longest run of all launched coasters without inversions (which means that there's one with inversions that's longer). Let's face it, even if it tries to be the best in some specific respects, it's not faster or higher than stuff that has existed already, but that doesn't matter. It's great fun.

When I first saw onride video footage of this thing, I was rather unimpressed. No looping, no helix, no special features that really struck the eye, just a lot of banked turns. But I was certain that the sensation of acceleration isn't properly conveyed through videos, and that's where the true soul of any coaster lies.

So, after standing in line for over an hour because the ride was temporarily shut down due to a technical fault, we finally made it to the boarding area, got into our seats, pulled down the safety bars, and set off! We then stopped on a long straight section of track with horizontal plates protruding from the rails, as you can see on the left side of the bottom pic. My bf in the seat in front of me turned around and began to ask "Is this like a catapult launWHOOOSH off we went! I've never been on a launched coaster before, and the ludicrous acceleration is just otherworldly! Soon, we were racing through the tight bends and curves that looked so benign in the video, but which had me slamming against the sides of my seat, despite the tight restraint. This was just absolutely epic already. But then, halfway through, with a lot of speed still, we raced into another long straight, some already thinking that this must be the braking section at the end of the ride. Wrong. It was a second launch, with the linear induction motors propelling the train forwards to crazy speeds as we raced into a steeply rising curve, climbing to the highest point of the run!

Just absolutely fantstic. That second launch is just such an unbelievable adrenaline rush, I can't describe it. Entering that section at speed and then getting that huge boost of acceleration... Very impressed by this, even though the top speed is "only" around 117kph (73mph), it feels incredibly fast, even more so with no windshield whatsoever. I hope I'll be able to ride some of the truly outlandish launched coasters like Kingda Ka or Formula Rossa. Hard to believe that I used to be absolutely scared of roller coasters as a child.