Wooden coasters do offer one advantage over steel coasters, assuming you're looking for palm-sweating thrills: they sway a lot more. Tubular steel coasters allow more looping, higher and steeper hills, greater drops and rolls, and faster speeds.
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There's a grit, akin to making a meal from scratch yourself or driving a dirt road off the beaten path. If you want to feel like you've REALLY ridden a roller coaster, really had your bones rattled and your nerves tested, wooden coasters are where it's at.
From their rumbling, shuddering sounds to their thrilling vibrations, wooden coasters heighten the rider's sense of danger. A wooden coaster's train seems to fight to stay on the track. Functioning as a shock absorber, the coaster structure is designed to sway with the force of the moving train.
You'll notice a big difference in the ride depending on the type of material used. In general, wooden coasters are nonlooping. They're also not as tall and not as fast, and they don't feature very steep hills or as long a track as steel ones do.
While there are some concerns about their safety, wooden roller coasters are generally considered to be just as safe as their steel counterparts. With proper maintenance and inspection, wooden roller coasters can provide years of fun and excitement for riders.
Gravity, inertia, g-forces, and centripetal acceleration give riders constantly changing forces which create certain sensations as the coaster travels around the track.
That said, wooden rides present their own set of safety challenges. If you don't look after wood carefully, it can rot. We fight against that by coating the tracks with weather-resistant wood stain. We also check on the wood's condition every week, replacing any parts that are showing signs of rot.
Far more than steel, wooden coasters can get rougher over time, as rails and ledgers sag and bend under the weight of a 15,000-pound car bouncing around the track. A poorly maintained wooden coaster can become a rough, unpleasant ride.
So, as far as I can tell, the only wooden coaster that has ever had a vertical loop is the Son of Beast, which is no longer open. RCT allows us to build wooden coasters with these vertical loops, but it does look rather tacky and perhaps very unrealistic.
Steel coasters have a generally smoother ride than their wooden counterparts, and due to their strength, rides can have more complex and faster turns and twists without injuring riders.
A poorly maintained wooden coaster can become a rough, unpleasant ride. The Gravity Group tries to reduce maintenance needs by carefully shaping the run-outs on the hills, for example, so that the car, which leaves the track slightly as it comes over the top, lands more smoothly.
The two major types of roller coasters are wooden and steel. Features in the wheel design prevent the cars from flipping off the track. Wooden tracks are more inflexible than steel, so usually don't have such complex loops that might flip passengers upside down.
Kings Island's wooden roller coaster lineup is highlighted by the legendary Beast, which opened in 1979 and still stands today as the world's longest wooden roller coaster at 7,359 feet. Literally millions of guests have visited Kings Island over the past four decades for the singular challenge of “taming” The Beast.