| Mighty Canadian Minebuster | |
| Mighty Canadian Minebuster going up to its lift hill | |
| Location | Canada's Wonderland |
|---|---|
| Status | Operating |
| Opened | 1981 |
| Cost | $1.2M est. |
| Type | Wood |
| Manufacturer | Taft Broadcasting |
| Designer | Curtis D. Summers |
| Track layout | Out and Back |
| Lift/launch system | Chain lift hill |
| Height | 90 ft (27 m) |
| Drop | 87 ft (27 m) |
| Length | 3,828 ft (1,167 m) |
| Max speed | 55.9 mph (90.0 km/h) |
| Duration | 2:02 |
| Height restriction | 4 ft 0 in (122 cm) |
| Mighty Canadian Minebuster at RCDB | |
| Pictures of Mighty Canadian Minebuster at RCDB | |
| Amusement Parks Portal | |
The Mighty Canadian Minebuster (often shortened to just Minebuster) was one of the four roller coasters that debuted with Canada's Wonderland, an amusement park located in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada, in 1981, and is still operational today. It is one of two wooden roller coasters at the park that are modelled after rides that existed at Coney Island amusement park in Cincinnati, Ohio (specifically, the Shooting Star); Wild Beast is the other. Minebuster was originally intended to be the centrepiece of the never-built Frontier Canada section of the park.[1]
Minebuster is an out and back roller coaster, and uses two trains, with five cars holding six riders (in rows of two) each. The ride was designed by Curtis D. Summers and built in-house. The coaster was not built by PTC despite a plaque at the operator's booth and several published reports that claim it was. PTC stopped building coasters in 1979.[2] It is likely however, that the construction crew consisted of workers who had previously built coasters for PTC. The two 30-passenger trains were supplied by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company. Canada's Wonderland's water park, Splash Works, has two sets of slides that pass over the Mighty Canadian Minebuster.[3]
The coaster in recent years has been hampered with some roughness, along with being modified several times for incoming Water Park additions, where some of the four hills have been joined together making them much longer with less of a peak therefore significantly reducing the amount of negative G's experienced.
Minebuster will be familiar to most coaster riders as a modified out and back wooden coaster, specifically with the addition of an upward spiraling helix at the end as the most obvious modification to the traditional out and back layout. The riders make an immediate U-turn to the left after leaving the station, past the storage depot and head up the chain lift hill. At the crest of the lift, the train makes a very small drop and turns right for the big drop. You then do two negative-G hills and pass under a waterslide before climbing up a larger hill and making a turnaround to the right. You then drop down and rush over three smaller hills before entering a banked turn to the left. For a finale, you roar through a helix inside a tunnel before entering the brake run which stops the train.
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