The Smiler is the world’s first 14 loop rollercoaster. It’s twisting track combines the world beating 14 loops with a speed of 85 km/hr and a track length 3x longer than Oblivion! This will challenge your body and mind
The Smiler is a steel roller coaster at the British theme park Alton Towers . The roller coaster was built by Gerstlauer and holds the world record for the longest inversion in a roller coaster history with a total of fourteen inversions. The coaster opened on 31 May 2013.
Plans for the construction of The Smiler were first announced in December 2011. It was later announced that Gerstlauer would build the coaster. Planning permission for the coaster was granted by the council on 15 March 2012. The ride is located on the site of the former Black Hole , which had been closed since 2005. A month after planning permission was granted, Alton Towers launched a website for the coaster, where it was then called Secret Weapon 7 (SW7) . At the same time, demolition of Black Hole began, which lasted until 6 May 2012.
A trademark filing by Merlin Entertainments Group suggested that the coaster would be called The Smiler . On October 17, 2012, various details of the coaster were announced, such as its maximum speed, length, duration, capacity, and cost. The name was not yet announced. By the end of the month, the first sections of the coaster entered the park. On December 7, 2012, construction of the vertical structure of the coaster began.
The name of the roller coaster was announced in January 2013. As previously expected, the roller coaster would go by the name The Smiler . On March 28, 2013, the trains of The Smiler were delivered. The vertical construction was completed in April 2013.
The coaster was originally scheduled to open in March 2013 at the start of the season, but due to construction problems, it was postponed until May 23. Due to problems during tests and a test ride with the press, the opening was postponed again. The journalists were stuck in the coaster for 30 minutes when it stopped for the first inversion. The Smiler finally opened on May 31, 2013.
On Tuesday 2 June 2015 at around 2:30 pm a serious accident occurred on the roller coaster. A train filled with 16 people collided with another train that was stationary on the track. The four people in the front row were seriously injured. Following this incident, the Alton Towers park remained completely closed from Wednesday 3 June to Sunday 7 June 2015. On 8 June the park reopened for the first time, but the X-sector (the theme area with The Smiler) remained closed for further investigation. On Monday 15 June the X-sector also reopened, but without The Smiler.
After a long investigation, the park began an inspection and testing of the track in the first week of September 2015. This was the first activity on the roller coaster after the removal of the crashed trains. On Monday 7 September 2015, the roller coaster started moving again for the first time and test rides with empty carriages took place during the day. The roller coaster really reopened to visitors in the following amusement park season.
The ride had experienced technical problems earlier in the day. The stationary cart was empty and had been sent out earlier as a test, but had stalled on the track because it was not filled with weighted test dummies. The next train then crashed into this empty cart.
This should never happen, as roller coasters are equipped with a safety system that ensures that there are never two trains on the same block section . On 23 August 2015, Alton Towers announced that an engineer had ignored a safety warning in the system and sent the train onto the track, while the system had previously stopped the train. By manually "overriding" the safety system, the accident could therefore happen. The accident is therefore not due to the roller coaster, because the safety system had worked.
Ultimately, CCTV footage showed that the empty carriage had stalled due to a strong headwind. It had been hanging upside down for twenty seconds before rolling back, causing it to hang in an unexpected place and therefore more difficult to see on CCTV footage. This may explain why an employee allowed the next train, which had been stopped by the system, to depart anyway. However, it is not certain whether the employee actually looked at the footage.
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