When rollercoaster fans speak of creativity, they speak of the old, the retired or the dead. They speak of Anton Schwarzkopf, late pioneer of the loop, and Ron Toomer, who became the first engineer to haul people up more than 200ft before sending them into a drop. They speak of Alan Schilke and Jeff Pike, both slowing down now, both admired for their structures that marry timber with steel. They speak of Werner Stengel, a living legend at 88, one of whose many new ideas was to send passengers hurtling around corners while tilted at 90 degrees. Because the work of rollercoaster creation asks for confidence of vision, the staying power to see through long projects, as well as an encyclopaedic grasp of which manoeuvres have and haven’t been tried yet, it is not a conspicuously youthful game. John Burton – a self-effacing aficionado of theme parks and musical theatre from Staffordshire – is an anomaly. He was only a few years on from working as a crab feeder at an English aquarium when he was invited to create his first rollercoaster. He was given an £18m budget, a patch of damp ground, and told: make it big. He was 27.
Burton had to warm to rollercoasters from a place of cold terror. Even standing near them upset him when he was young. “I used to say to my mum: ‘Don’t make me ride it,’” he recalled. Aged 12 or so, he worked up the courage to get on Nemesis, a rollercoaster at Alton Towers, a theme park near his home. Curiosity became an obsession in his teens, when he started to play RollerCoaster Tycoon, a computer game that allowed him to devise his own rides. He took the job in the aquarium while he was studying architecture at Birmingham City University. The aquarium was owned by Merlin Entertainments, a live-attractions conglomerate, the second biggest in the world after Disney. When a role came up in Merlin’s creative department, Burton, nearing the end of his degree, applied. He went through months of interviews, almost ruining himself on the train fares to London. In the end he won the job, he said, on the strength of those speculative rollercoasters he had made in a video game.
Burton has an earnest and infectious belief that thrill rides ought to be thrilling, yes, but also interesting. As a Merlin employee, he rose quickly up the ranks and by 2019 he was one of the company’s leading creatives. That year, the CEO, Nick Varney, decided to demolish an old log flume at Thorpe Park, a Merlin resort near the M25 in Surrey, and to put something more attention-grabbing in its place. Burton was given the project to look after. He had just the one instruction from his bosses, to raise up a rollercoaster to a height of 213ft or more at its peak, which would make it Britain’s tallest: something that could be boasted about in future marketing materials. He knew that whatever he created might end up being a referendum on his youthful hiring and his rapid elevation. “I was relatively new,” he said, “and this was their biggest ever investment in a ride.”
Working in offices around the perimeter of Thorpe Park that were scattered with gold-sequined costumes and giant eyeballs, the leftover props of forgotten attractions, Burton led weeks of meetings, trying to drum up ideas. Sometimes, if he was in London, he borrowed space at Madame Tussauds museum, another attraction owned by Merlin. Sitting in a storeroom among waxwork models of the royals and Mariah Carey, Burton consulted with specialist ride manufacturers, many of which are based in the US and Europe, with several clustered in Germany and its neighbour, Liechtenstein. He was searching for collaborators whose tastes matched his own.
On research trips abroad, whether to California to try a rollercoaster called Twisted Colossus or to Poland for one called Zadra, Burton was always most impressed by the creations that were rewarding as well as intimidating, arranged to be savoured like meals, not simply endured like horror movies. The design of a good rollercoaster? It’s choreographed, he told me. “It’s like a West End musical, the peaks and the troughs. We’re trying to put people in euphoric moments – or keep them right on the knife-edge of euphoria – right till the moment we hit the brakes. It’s a show.”
Burton was echoing his childhood hero, John Wardley, probably the most admired Briton in the field of rollercoaster design. It was Wardley who created Nemesis, the ride that once intimidated, then inspired, a 12-year-old Burton. When he started working for Merlin, he was paired with a semi-retired Wardley to collaborate on the refurbishment of old attractions. In 2022, when Nemesis was forced to close for a season to undergo a complete replacement of the track, Wardley asked Burton to sit beside him on a farewell run. It was a symbolic moment, the young pretender and the veteran, strapped next to each other in the front seats.
Wardley told me that to make it as a creator of rollercoasters, you have to be a jack of all trades, a canny manager of other specialists and their skills, something like an orchestra conductor, or a Hollywood producer. “You have to know how to create a product that will satisfy the market,” Wardley said, “that will entertain while at the same time being reliable, safe and cost-effective. You’re thinking of physicality, sensuality, limitations, how fast your ride will go, whether its G-forces will be too much or insufficient, what will it look like.”
A creator must figure out how to meet all these demands as the months rush by. “Boy, I tell you what, those rollercoaster deadlines loom,” said Pike, one of the great creators of the 2000s and 2010s. Now in middle age, Pike might have been enjoying a productive mid-career if not for what he described to me, candidly, as exhaustion. “Not a lot of wriggle room when a park is basing a whole season on the introduction of a new ride,” he said. “It’s on us, as creators, and there’s nobody to fall back on. There’s no corner to hide in. It’s on you to make it work and that takes a toll. I used to be thin and handsome. Now look. I’m old and grey.”
Burton – not old, not grey, not yet – was gearing up to spend the years from 2020 to 2024 as a broker between engineers and architects, marketeers and money people, builders and operators, thrill-ride enthusiasts and those more casual ticket-holders who would one day ride and judge whatever rollercoaster he dreamed up. It would be a feat of imagination and construction that would absorb the remainder of his 20s and some of his 30s before he ever got the chance to sit down, strap in and ride the thing.
* * *
Burton has a mop of fine brown hair that rises straight up from the roots whenever he is dropped from height on a ride. In such moments, he resembles a scared boy in a cartoon. At work, he tends to wear pale shirts, casual trousers and one or two pieces of silver jewellery. He also keeps to hand a collection of lanyards and name-pins that will gain him access to the various theme parks that Merlin owns around the UK and Europe. Two of Burton’s favourite musicals are Wicked and The Greatest Showman; in professional approach, he’s more a Wizard of Oz, controlling things from behind a curtain, than he is a spotlight-hungry PT Barnum. “John’s knowledgable and personable,” said Claire Eglinton, a creative producer whom Burton brought on to his team, in part because of her background in theatre and dance. “He’s ridden a lot. Seen a lot. He knows what ’coasters have to do: make you feel you’ve stepped out of the world you’re in.”
Working from home during the lockdowns of 2020, Burton started to think of what might be done with the three-peaked shape of his favourite musicals in mind. Big, splashy overture to start … a surprising, thought-provoking number around the interval … later, the soaring ballad, to send people away puffy-eyed and swollen-hearted. He thought a vertical plunge, straight down from the top, would serve well as overture. A slow, grand loop near the end ought to provide that late emotional kick. He puzzled over the middle phase of his ride for a long time, into the spring of 2021. By now Burton was in regular video calls with a structural engineer, Maurice Kremer, who worked at Mack, a construction firm based in Germany. Mack had won the contract to model, manufacture and assemble the new rollercoaster. “What do you want to feel?” Kremer would ask clients like Burton. “Tell me, and I’ll try to realise it.”
Using Mack’s in-house design software, Burton and Kremer focused on finer aspects of their ride, shaping the different sections of the track – “elements”, in industry speak – that would serve as punctuation points. A dozen or more elements might be strung together to form a rollercoaster’s finished layout, each doing something different to the bodies of passengers, rotating them or righting them, speeding them up or slowing them down, lifting them up or letting them fall.
Certain aspects of this design process have changed remarkably little in centuries. Robert Cartmell, the late historian of thrill rides, wrote that the first wheeled rollercoasters appeared in tsarist Russia and later in the mining hills of the eastern United States in the early 19th century. In the 1810s and 20s, in France, engineers figured out how to secure rollercoaster trains to tracks using special wheels. They figured out how to haul those trains up hills, by noisy, ratchet-secured cables. “It’s just a big energy balance,” Pike explained. “It’s high-school physics. You start with the energy you put into a train. Some of these modern ’coaster guys, they work with magnetics, they work with hydraulics, they can put energy into a train a whole host of ways. Most of us still do it with a chain – clack, clack, clack, up a lift-hill. In other words we work with gravity.” Most gravity-based rollercoasters can get up enough energy on a lift-hill to last between one and three minutes from departure to return.
Some of the very first rollercoaster trains expended their energy on tracks shaped like figure eights. When technology and imaginative daring allowed, these tracks were given dip elements, dive elements, loop elements. The loops were pioneered by Schwarzkopf, a 20th-century impresario working out of Münsterhausen, Germany. It was his apprentice, Stengel, who led the way towards the more extreme elements we see today: the bow tie, the bat wing, the pretzel, the horseshoe, the cobra, the scorpion tail and the sea serpent, all named for their shape. Other elements have names borrowed from aerobatic aviation: the Immelmann turn, the hammerhead turn and the Top Gun stall. A rollercoaster element called the heart-line roll – a lovely example of industrial poetry – got its name from a romantic notion that passengers sent through these tight corkscrews are spun around and around their own beating hearts.
Strangely, in the early 2020s, when Burton and Kremer were finishing the design of their rollercoaster, there was only one element named after a creator. The Stengel, invented by Stengel in the early 00s, is a special type of rotational turn that sends passengers around a high bank on what feels like the wrong side of the track, its outer side not its inner side. Fans love Stengels because they are thrown up out of their seats against their restraints, which creates sensations of weightlessness. When I asked Pike to describe a Stengel for the uninitiated, he soon gave up. “You’re entering it, you’re travelling up in a loop, you make a 90-degree turn as you’re vertical … Hey, you got a piece of paper?”
Pike sighed. “All this was easier when it was a lot of hills and turns,” he said. “Now you’re upside down and inverted and turning sideways in ways that don’t even make sense.” He told me that when he first saw what Burton and Kremer were plotting for Thorpe Park, he thought he was looking at something from a comic book – “A kid’s ideal visualisation of what an insane rollercoaster would look like. Twenty years ago, I would have looked at their plans and said: ‘Yeah, right. Nobody’s ever gonna let you build that.’”
“That”, by the end of 2021, was a still-nameless rollercoaster with a Stengel as centrepiece between a super-fast drop and a slowed-down loop, with various smaller manoeuvres connecting these main elements. Burton and Kremer kept trying to tease out and elongate the few seconds of weightlessness that the Stengel would provide. By adjusting accelerations, trajectories and shapes, could passengers be kept floating in their seats for three seconds? Could they be kept floating for four seconds? With each new tweak they inputted, the Mack software redrew the layout of the track. “It was just trial and error,” Kremer told me later.
One day, Burton said, the software scrambled things around. Their elongated Stengel now ended in a diving roll that would flip passengers upside down, providing 4.2 seconds of weightlessness. “Well,” Kremer said to himself, “that’s something new.” Burton was overjoyed. He had never found maths more beautiful, he told me. Staring at this weird, untried new element on his computer screen, he felt twinges of the old terror. “Don’t make me ride it,” he thought. And this was promising.
* * *
By the summer of 2022, applications had been submitted to various planning bodies, including Thorpe Park’s local council, Runnymede Borough, the members of which voted through the new rollercoaster with ill-concealed glee at a meeting in October. (“I can’t see why any councillors would want to go against this,” one official said. “Let’s have some excitement.”) A harsher scrutiny came from the online community of enthusiasts who had been able to track what Burton was up to ever since his plans entered the public domain. To try to preserve a measure of secrecy, Merlin cloaked the project in codenames. “Bauer” was a reference to Kiefer Sutherland’s character in the TV show 24, itself a reference to the deadline for the ride’s completion in 2024. “High Rise” was self-explanatory. “Exodus”, the codename that stuck the longest, had no meaning, it just sounded cool. Intrigued, enthusiasts paid especially close attention to Project Exodus’s elongated Stengel. One observer wrote on a Reddit forum that, in purely physical terms, this element was going to be trying its best to throw everybody out of their seats and over the M25.
In Croatia, it might be worth noting, they call rollercoasters “trains of death”. The first rollercoaster fatality I found on record occurred in the 1880s at the Texas state fair. In the 1920s, in Pennsylvania, a woman died after standing up on a rollercoaster to adjust her dress. The following decade Omaha, Nebraska, went as far as to ban rollercoasters for a time, after a derailment in the city killed four. In the 00s, the Japanese government changed its own laws around rollercoaster safety after a derailment in Osaka. In 2010, a theme park in Rio, Brazil, was closed after a fatal accident led to manslaughter charges. In 2015, two people died on a Chinese park’s first day in business. The park never reopened and its four-loop rollercoaster was decommissioned. That was the same year as a terrible accident at a Merlin-owned park. A rollercoaster called Smiler crashed at Alton Towers, seriously injuring five people, two of whom had to have limbs amputated.
It weighs on creators, Pike said, the risk of getting things wrong. He held up an inch-thick book of international safety standards: “And that’s just for the design side, not even construction.” At least since Schwarzkopf started turning passengers on their heads, rollercoaster creators have known that the appeal of what they offer is the near-dangerous, the danger-adjacent; a succession of danger-flavoured sensations, undertaken in conditions of guaranteed non-danger. The creator makes a promise to the passenger. Whatever happens during this ride will stop happening, leaving you a story to tell.
And when everything is working, what stories. Kingda Ka in New Jersey is currently the world’s tallest rollercoaster at 456ft. A Ferrari-themed speedster in Abu Dhabi is the fastest, getting up to 149mph. Since it opened in 2021, consensus has formed that the dinosaur-themed VelociCoaster in Florida offers the best in-ride narrative, pairing persuasive set dressing from the Jurassic Park movie franchise with well-engineered convolutions of the body. Steel Vengeance, built a few years earlier in Ohio by Schilke, has no narrative at all. Fans know Steel Vengeance as Steve, a plain, unpretentious provider of thrills.
By 2022, it was time for Burton and his collaborators to settle on a name for their own ride. Should it be something dreamy, like Shambhala in Spain? Something eccentric, like Cunning Mouse in Kazakhstan? Something faintly pornographic, like Top Thrill 2 in Ohio? There are many rollercoasters named for the metal that underpins them, not only Steel Vengeance but Steel Dragon, Steel Lasso, and Superman – Ride of Steel. Other rollercoasters are named for the racket they make: Rollin’ Thunder; Thunder Run. Rides in China tend to be burdened with names that are stiffly literal: Ten Inversion Rollercoaster, Eleven Ring.
There are more than 5,000 active rollercoasters around the world, about 1,000 of which might be classed as extreme, or not for children. There are so many that the supply of feasible names is running low. Fans have started to keep helpful lists of anything decent that’s yet to be used. Burton consulted these lists with Ruth Storey, the marketing director at Thorpe Park, as they were trying to find a name. Red-haired and energetic, Storey is not a born thrill-seeker, and has sometimes found herself frozen at the front of queues for rides she knows she has to try, but can’t. “I tell anyone standing behind: ‘Just shove me.’” For a while, Storey and Burton thought about calling their rollercoaster Summit. They plotted out an intricate ski theme. Next, they thought about the name Meteor, for which they would style everything around the apocalypse. Storey said: “More thought went into naming this rollercoaster than it did for either of my kids.” They received endless suggestions from colleagues, relatives and board members.
Wardley told me that it was normal for tensions to exist between the executives who front up money for rides and the creative figures they empower to vanish for years at a time, spending that money. He lamented what he saw as a board-level obsession with breaking records. “What they set as a criterion, you have to work to. But you mustn’t lose sight of the fact that you’re trying to create something that has longevity, not just something that will get in the record books for a year.” Burton told me that at one point he was reduced to drawing cartoons of happy, hovering astronauts – showing these cartoons to skittish bosses and promising that the new ride ought to feel about the same. He was as tied up in hope and faith about this as anyone. He said: “It’s a really, really long wait.”
And still they needed that name. Goliath? Taken. GOAT? Plain bad. Euphoria? Too druggy. Tiny? “The focus groups didn’t get it,” Storey said. “They told us: ‘But it’s big.’” An advertising agency pitched in with OMG. “But what colour is OMG?” Burton wondered. “What story does OMG tell?” When an executive at Merlin suggested Angel of the South – a nod to the Antony Gormley sculpture in Gateshead – it was nixed by legal advisers because of copyright concerns. The notion of something winged led Burton and Storey to Icarus, which would have been perfect, they said, if not for the crashing-and-dying aspect. They kept searching, but not before a winged motif was sent to Merlin’s merchandising department, which worked to deadlines of its own.
It has become an article of faith in rollercoaster creation that when restrictions are imposed, creativity flourishes. When he was making Nemesis, 30 years ago, Wardley had to position his ride in such a way that it would not be seen above the nearby trees. So, boom. He blew out the ground with dynamite and built in the hole. Pike told me the one time he felt creatively blocked was when he was given an empty field in the Netherlands and told to do whatever he liked. “There was nothing to guide me. Why turn left or right? Why go up? What’s the reason?” He ended up grabbing the nearest thing to hand, a newspaper caricature of the comedian Jay Leno, and tracing the shape of the face, jump-starting inspiration that way.
Stuck with their winged motif, which was soon to be printed on gift shop souvenirs, Burton and Storey scoured the internet for inspiration. “I could have got a classics degree, all the research I did,” Storey said. They toyed with Hydra and Volantis before Burton suggested Hyperia – a water god, marginal enough to be free of narrative padding. “Brilliant,” Storey said, “we’ll write our own.” Their Hyperia would be eager for adventure but scared of water. She would make some wings and fly away. Burton commissioned a soaring orchestral theme song that would play on a loop to waiting passengers.
Whenever he gazes around at people in theme-park queues, Burton privately assigns them a number that speaks to their level of presumed engagement. Level one guests are all about the ride hardware, interested in sensation only. Level two guests notice the theme that creators have sweated buckets over, and level three guests – Burton’s favourites – revel in the theme, letting themselves get swept up in a story if a creator is trying to tell them one. Level four guests do exist, but they are rarer: level four guests are other John Burtons, creators or obsessives who will notice (say) the efforts put in to make a fire extinguisher blend in with its surroundings. It is for level fours that Burton always sprinkles his attractions with meta references. He told me he knows when a ride has been created by another level four, because an inhuman degree of care will have been taken over a toilet block, a merch hut, an operators’ booth. It was for the level fours that he included a kink in the track of Hyperia, just outside the station, that would momentarily roll passengers on to their left sides even as the train beneath them curved slowly to the right: the nearest thing you might see to a joke delivered in cross-beamed steel.
* * *
It was early 2023: 18 months to go. Over at Mack’s factory in Waldkirch, Germany, long sticks of rail were being milled and bent into different shapes, then fitted with crossbeams and diagonals and welded together to become pieces of Hyperia’s track. Ninety-two of these pieces were shipped to Surrey in crates, where they were put together under the supervision of Merlin’s construction team in what amounted to a massive effort of self-assembly. “It’s a big Ikea set,” Burton said; he would sometimes look out of the window of his office at Thorpe Park, through the summer and autumn of 2023, to see chunks of white-and-gold painted track lying out in a weedy car park. The first support columns were fixed deep into the ground in October. Steel track was added to the columns in segments, so that curls of half-formed banks and loops began to appear throughout November, these elements only starting to connect and make sense in the first months of 2024. Last to go up was the top piece of the lift-hill, a wide curving arc that was hoisted into place in March. Burton ascended with it, taken by crane to sign his name on the steel.
Later he told me how nervous he was, a fear that had nothing to do with being up so high. “Once your ’coaster is being built, it is what is,” Burton said. “If there’s any doubt …” He trailed off. “Well, after a certain point, you can’t have doubts.” He was never very comfortable being singled out from his team for special praise and he could sometimes be defensively unromantic about the project he was overseeing. “It’s just mass transit,” he told me one day, when we were looking up at Hyperia from beneath its spiny underbelly. “A rollercoaster takes thousands of millions of people through space. Same principles as trains.”
We moved around to look at the elongated Stengel, which now climbed hundreds of feet into the air – steep, flexed, resembling to me a giant’s upturned lip. Within the offices of Merlin, they sometimes referred to this startling new element as the Burton twist. It was an effort by Storey and others to give a memorable name to a section of the ride that was otherwise difficult to describe in marketing materials. It was also a bid to reward their team leader for his hard work. Here was an admirer of Schilke and Stengel, an apprentice to Wardley, being offered a place at the feet of creators he idolised. Only, Burton couldn’t bring himself to go along with the name. He thought the Burton twist sounded silly and boastful and he dissuaded his colleagues from using it.
In April, it was time for the rollercoaster’s maiden voyage – an unmanned one. Even so, it was a big occasion for Burton and his team. Several hollow dummies, moulded from blue plastic into the shape of adults, were secured inside one of Hyperia’s trains using over-the-shoulder restraints. Through stoppered holes in their heads, each dummy was filled with enough water to make them about the weight of a real person. The train left the station and the dummies were sent on several circuits of the track. Below, engineers, ride operators and maintenance crew listened closely for what they called the “lumpy” sounds that might signal an unhappy rollercoaster. They were sniffing the air for the ferrous scent of metal filings that might signal if there was too much friction on the track. This unmanned testing phase lasted about a fortnight. At the end of each day, the stoppers would be removed from the heads of the dummies, which were then sent out on final, load-lightening runs, liquid gushing out of their heads as if there’d been some atrocious accident on board.
By May, Hyperia was ready to be ridden by people. It is accepted industry etiquette that manufacturers, not clients, offer themselves as meat for the first human tests. Kremer was among the Mack employees who travelled over from Waldkirch to be on the first train. “You have simulated it a few thousand times on your screen,” Kremer told me, “then you get on and realise, oh that’s it, that’s what we’ve built.” When the engineers from Mack deemed it safe, Merlin employees were allowed to try their rollercoaster, too. One freezing morning that May, when there weren’t yet any visitors in the park, Burton finally got to sit down and strap in.
He boarded with members of his team, several of whom had theatrical backgrounds, which contributed to a general sense that they were there for a dress rehearsal. “One where the theatre seats are about to start moving at 80mph,” Burton said.
Years of effort, over in a minute. He couldn’t stop smiling. He couldn’t think. The overture, the interesting middle, the emotional near-finale – all of it seemed to be in there. It would take several more circuits before he could start to pry apart the elements in his mind and consider them individually. Endorphins flushed around his system. “You’re left with snapshots that you keep replaying,” he told me afterwards. “I think that’s the body starting to compute, starting to try to make linked logical sense of things.”
When I asked Pike to remember his first ride on his first creation, he said: “Yeah, the Kentucky Rumbler. I was super-excited, super-scared. ‘I hope this feels like I thought it would.’” Wardley told me that a veteran creator will have ridden through countless mental circuits by the time they complete a real one. “You learn to experience these rides in your mind. There might be some question marks. But if you’re very experienced, nothing should come as a great surprise.” Burton was not yet very experienced. “Some parts didn’t feel as intense as I hoped,” he admitted, “and some things felt more intense than I ever imagined.”
In the days after that first ride, his scrambled brain kept returning to the elongated Stengel. Kremer and the Mack engineers had managed to stretch out the weightlessness of the Stengel to five seconds – even more than the 4.2 seconds they had promised in the plans. Burton described the element to me as an “Oh-my-goodness that doesn’t let up … No one else in the world has experienced this type of sensation in one go on their body.” Kremer told me that the element had made him feel as though he was in flight. Later that May, when the rollercoaster was opened to the public, one of the first passengers to get on was an enthusiast, Jack Silkstone, who hosts a rollercoaster-themed YouTube channel. When Silkstone hit the Stengel, he burst into tears.
Online reviewers called it a good, even a great rollercoaster. By June, fans were showing up in the Hyperia queue wearing Burton’s name on customised T-shirts. Just then – like a child timing a tantrum for the maximum embarrassment of its parents – Hyperia stopped working. A train full of passengers got lodged at a sharp upward angle on the lift-hill. They were stranded for an hour, during which time a maintenance worker had to hike up with ropes to reassure everyone they were safe. The passengers eventually finished their run. Four days later, during an unmanned test that resulted from the hiccup, one of Hyperia’s trains failed to get up and around an element. The train rolled, sickeningly, backwards. There were further closures, at which point stories about Hyperia’s unreliability began to appear in the press. On 15 June, to mark the one-month anniversary of the launch, the BBC counted the number of days the ride had been accessible to the public – just seven out of a possible 27. Everybody involved in Hyperia’s creation kept using the phrase “teething trouble”.
I was at Thorpe Park with Storey, one Saturday later in June, when Hyperia’s teething troubles seemed to be at their peak. Storey is a mucker-inner who usually goes about the resort with a stick for gathering litter. Today, she held a walkie-talkie and a buzzing phone, too. As marketing director, she was required to be on site as de facto disappointment manager, deciding if and when to give ticket-holders a refund. After weeks of trouble caused by mechanical failures, the weather now appeared to be against Hyperia as well. It was unseasonably windy. As Storey explained, all big rides have weather sensors fitted at their highest points. As soon as agreed maximums are exceeded (in this case, winds that would make evacuations difficult at height) a big ride must close. “People say: ‘It’s not that windy.’ I say: ‘Try going up 236ft.’”
When rumours spread around the park that Hyperia would soon be back in service, people started to drift to the queueing area without being told to. Often, during that stoppage-bothered summer of 2024, people stood and waited for several hours for a ride they knew would last about 60 seconds. As Storey and I watched the line get longer and longer, I struggled to think of an equivalent experience that teenagers, seventysomethings and everyone in between might be willing to wait for, so uncomplainingly, so stubbornly. It looked like a form of hysteria to me, but then again, I hadn’t ridden the rollercoaster myself yet.
I had tracked the rise of columns and crossbeams, the welding of joins, the careful north-south alignment of the hundreds of nuts and bolts that hold Hyperia together, that are checked for misalignment every day by maintenance staff using binoculars. I had read planning documents, marketing decks, acceleration charts. I had a thorough academic understanding of what Burton’s creation was prepared to do to me. But riding a rollercoaster is something like parenthood or bereavement. You can’t imagine yourself into it. Rollercoasters are one of the last hold-outs against simulation. A pilgrimage has to be made. You must find out for yourself.
* * *
‘Come on,” Burton said to me one day in July, “let’s ride.” Hyperia was operating more smoothly. Burton’s ride tally was up to 32. He had ridden Hyperia on sunny days. He had ridden Hyperia blind, scrunching up his eyes against raindrops. He’d ridden Hyperia empty and full; front, back and middle; over track that was sun-warmed or drizzle-cooled; on circuits a little sluggish and then, because of a different capricious mix of conditions, the fastest yet. If not actually riding Hyperia, Burton’s favourite thing to do was position himself near the final bunny hop to watch as passengers came tipping and gasping into the last few seconds of the brake run. Sometimes, they would be bent forwards, as far their restraints would allow, as if in folds of laughter or crushed by bad news. Sometimes, passengers returned to the station sitting straight, blank faced – processing. There were smiling passengers and muttering passengers and passengers still yelling oaths or wiping snot or tears or drool from their faces. It was rarely the same, train to train, seat to seat.
Burton had been working in his office on the outskirts of the park when I found him. Now, standing up, he knocked against some costume wings that were propped behind his chair. Feathers floated around us as Burton pinned an employee’s name badge to his shirt. As we left his office and went towards the gates, I could see his mighty rollercoaster beyond: appalling drop, yawning loop, massive Stengel. Screams carried over to us on the breeze.
I gestured at the Stengel and asked Burton if he regretted not letting his name be attached to it. A few weeks earlier, Kremer had flown over to Surrey again to give a talk about his contributions to Hyperia. He was joined on stage by a colleague who revealed that they had their own name for the elongated Stengel back at Mack’s offices. They had been calling it a Kremerollen or a Kremer roll. That day, someone in Kremer’s audience proposed that the German name be made official, and there was an impromptu vote. There were whoops and shouts of “Yeah!” Afterwards, Thorpe Park’s website was updated to include a short history of this new element, the Kremer roll. Burton had missed his moment. When we discussed it, walking through the park, he said he was grateful for a quieter moment of acknowledgment, one that meant a lot to him personally: Wardley had recently published a book of memoirs in which he wrote of Burton: “It’s over to you.”
We had reached the queue. Burton’s scribbled signature was way above us, at a height from which screaming or speechless passengers were being whipped over the lift-hill and sent towards the ground. Burton wasn’t immune to the sensory immensity of a rollercoaster. After 32 rides on this one, however, his thoughts were drifting towards the future and he was wondering what he and his team might build next. As for me, about to board, I could hardly speak. My stomach felt as if it was trying to climb up through my throat, maybe to cower somewhere in the skull.
Burton walked us around the back of the gift shop, where he was recognised by an operator who waved us through some gates that were meant for disembarking passengers. We were hustled into the front two seats of the next departing train. The restraints came down; an operator fixed them in place; then, with a small jolt, we were away.
I asked Burton to talk me through the elements as well as he was able to. “Lift-hill,” he said, as we rose up from beneath a canopy of trees, travelling quickly, so that soon we were higher than everything else in the park. The hollow clack of the ratchet beat steadily under our seats. “Try tensing your stomach muscles,” Burton advised. “It’s what fighter pilots do.” I began to say I was tensing everything, everywhere, already … then we were at the top. The sky seemed to bend overhead like a hood. “Vertical drop,” Burton said. And we dropped.
We weren’t falling, I felt, but accelerating with sinister intent towards the ground. The blood left my head and I lost my peripheral vision to a cotton-wool border of grey. As our train buzzed close to the people in the queue, then flung us up again, Burton wheezed a few incomprehensible words. His cheeks flapped like little sails. Interesting movements were set in quick and wild opposition to one another. We were rising and turning again, pushed out at about 90 degrees as we floated through the Stengel element that was once known as the Burton twist and is now and forever the Kremer roll. I was up against my restraints, my head and torso protruding over miles of uninterrupted airspace. I couldn’t see the track or the train, only sky. As seconds go, these were five long ones.
Burton knew better than anyone that there was no real danger. Even so, I saw him curl his shoes under the seat as though he was clinging on. “Stall inversion,” he managed to say, as we slowed and rose, drifting through a loop. “Trim brake,” he said, as we completed the loop and lurched forward in our seats. My brain had begun the weeks-long work of trying to order and rationalise what was happening. I put both hands to my forehead and kept them there as I thought about trying to put the experience into words, how the truest rendering might involve holding down the “F” key and never letting go.
“Bunny hop,” said Burton, as we bounced and slowed. The train was losing momentum.
“Brakes,” he said, and the train came to a stop.
• This article was amended on 29 October 2024. John Burton studied architecture at Birmingham City University, not the University of Birmingham.
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