A car roller coaster is probably exactly what you pictured when you heard the words: a roller coaster-type track, only with your normal car driving on it. This type of track had the erudite, sophisticated name of Whoopee Auto Coaster, and the first one was built in a Chicago suburb called Lyons, in 1929.
The company that built the Whoopee, the factually-named Coaster Construction Company, built similar tracks in Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Camden, New Jersey. These were wooden tracks, with lots of undulating hills and banked turns but, as far as I can tell, no one was daring enough to try to build in any loops. Some of these coasters appear to have had painted tracks on the, um, track that helped drivers visually guide the skinny tires of those Model Ts and other teens-and-’20s-era cars on the right path for, I suppose, optimum fun and, if we can even really use this word in this context, safety. An article covering the Los Angeles track described the track, which it noted was built in conjunction with a large, but un-named, amusement park: I like how the article ends with a bit of a scary warning, and the caption also mentions that the “owners of this auto coaster “get ’em both ways,” because not only do you pay to drive over the loop, you also have to pay to park inside it. Really, that’s not that unreasonable. … The road is constructed entirely of wood. Its circumference measures 2,243 feet, and a railing protects cars from skidding off the edges. It is wide enough to allow two cars to pass easily, but only one-way traffic is permitted. Drivers are instructed to follow the white guide lines painted on the surface of the roadway. … Although the curves are banked to make it practically impossible to turn over when rounding them at a fast rate of speed, the dips and rises will throw a car out of control if driven too fast.
There are wooden railings that I suppose could keep a car safely on the track if speeds remained low enough, but I’d think if you were really cooking all those railings would do is make the coroner add a line about “severe wood splinter intrusion” into the police report. Some sources mention speed limits on the track, which makes sense, though I’m not exactly sure how they’d have been enforced effectively. A guy with a whistle and a lot of trust in people? Delightfully, there is some footage of the tracks in action, being enjoyed, which you can see here:
Mostly, the track seems to be a roughly half-mile loop of those undulating hills which I’m sure were pretty fun. The turns were said to be banked enough to prevent a car from rolling over (the video doesn’t show any, but they do seem to have been a part of the layout, since it was loop), and it seems the track is wide enough that if you had to pass a car in front of you, that would be possible. I’m amazed that there seem to be no records of horrible crashes on these things. The cars were all top-heavy, leaf-sprung things with crappy cable-operated brakes, usually only braking half the wheels involved. And they appear to have allowed multiple cars on the track at once, which you would think would be a recipe for a lot of painful rear-end collisions as a faster car pops up over one of those humps. Plus, the whole thing is essentially a huge sine-wave bridge made of wooden sticks built by local carnies. Added all up, it feels like a clandestine project from some pro-organ donation cabal, but, incredibly, bloodbaths didn’t happen. What did happen to kill the project was more basic: when the American and global economy went to shit in October 1929, people were no longer in positions to possibly wreck their cars tearing ass over a series of wooden humps, and the auto coasters died out after 1930. Could something like this even be possible today? I feel like insurance alone would make it unlikely, and the idea of the driver of the car having total control of speed and steering seems a bit improbable. But, perhaps modern safety technology could let you drive over a bonkers track of some kind with enough safeguards that disaster could be kept at bay. It’d be kind of like the races in that 2008 Speed Racer movie:
But you know, with less fiery crashes, I guess. Y’all are clearly forgetting about the glory that was TLC’s Full Metal Challenge. Okay, by “today” I mean “20 years ago,” but their “Roller Coaster” game was basically the flagship challenge. http://www.ukgameshows.com/ukgs/Full_Metal_Challenge The full series (only 1 season) used to be on YouTube but seems to be scrubbed. Fortunately, I have it all on a hard drive. It’s a genuinely fun show to rewatch, and bizarre as hell. Why is Henry Rollins hosting a game show about homemade cars? Who knows. But I love it. I remember the “Octopush” car won that event, right? They also had that “soldier ant” car made from two aircooled Beetle rear ends (articulated in the middle, I think?) and I swear there was a weird little skid-steer thing that was basically an up-scaled zero turn mower. Mostly I’m glad someone else remembers it. I didn’t hallucinate it! The “Double-Dub” is the VW you’re thinking of, and yeah. Two beetle rear ends joined together with a hinge in the middle. Wild. And “Black Thunder” was built by the New Zealand team who were all lawn mower engineers, and they did exactly what you said–upscaled a zero-turning-radius riding mower design. Gosh, now I think I AM going to submit a piece on this. In my early 20,s living outside of Oklahoma City there were some great coaster roads. Those are probably still there if you’re lucky/unlucky enough to live there. On weekends, I’ll make an afternoon trip of it on my motorcycle, doing laps on a rough circuit. It’s esp. good fall and spring when the foliage is sparse enough that you can easily see through the turns. The best part is I’ve found a road that runs through a flat grassy pasture area…features two big sweepers, nothing to crash into, usually no other vehicles, and perfect visibility. It’s probably the only public place where I embrace my Nicky Hayden fantasies. Step 2: Allow a Raptor, TRex or Hummer EV on autocoaster. Step 3: Close autocoaster, call lawyers. https://www.gokartguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/go-karting-wisconsin-dells.jpg https://funatthetrack.com/ It seemed a good idea at first. Car ownership had boomed throughout the Twenties. Yet, after a couple weeks operation, the novelty of the Whoopie Coaster wore off; then, it was necessary to stimulate patronage by giving two or more rides around the track for a single admission. And after the stock market crash that October, drivers would become much more cautious about wear and tear on their cars. It was soon evident that the Whoopie track was a one-season wonder. By 1930, the Lyons track had closed, its proposed full-scale park never built.” At River Road and Irving Park Boulevard in Schiller Park, Illinois, the Suburban Amusement Company used 200,000 feet of number one pine lumber to construct what it called an “auto coaster.” For just ten cents you could enjoy the thrills of “mountain driving” in your own vehicle. The Whoopee Auto Coaster at Waukegan Road near Willow Road in Northfield delivered the same excitement over a “mile-long plank road.” One of the roads in Arizona passes across several aroyos providing a similar up and down motion. And yes, a VW Vanagon Westfalia can get airborne, just in case anyone was wondering. They had Prohibition so no legal alcohol from 1920-1933 but you can drive on this death trap at your own risk. I suspect that is was just a cover (1920’s Illinois?!?) for a way to sell some of that “good ole mountain dew”. “Momma, why’s daddy so happy all the sudden?” “Just shut up and hold on, sweetie”
