Thrill-seekers soon took notice, and the track was converted to a thrill ride in the afternoons. Mules, whose job was to pull the cars back up the hill, and a brave, solitary brakeman were apparently the first participants in this nine-mile, hair-raising tear down the mountain. The track was built so that miners could load mine cars with coal, shove them over the hillside, and let gravity do the rest. It was the second railroad ever built (1827) in the United States, and was originally used to haul coal from mountaintop mines down to the Lehigh River. The ultimate American thrill ride - past or present - may well have been the Mauch Chunk Switchback Gravity Railroad, in Mauch Chunk, Penn. It had two tracks that ran next to each other, so riders could race (and onlookers could bet on the outcome). In 1817 someone attached the carts to the tracks and dubbed the ride the Russian Mountains of Belleville. Eventually, someone swapped wheels for runners, and more ambitious and thrilling tracks were created. Undeterred, he or someone else developed an allseason solution by waxing the sled runners. Somewhere along the line, a French businessman brought the ice slide idea back to France, perhaps forgetting that Russian-like winters might be a prerequisite for their success. Riders would use a wooden sled or block of ice to slide at up to 50 miles-per-hour (mph) down giant icecovered wooden hills and crash-land into a sand pile at the bottom. These large wooden structures, up to 70-feet tall, were popular throughout Russia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Most coaster historians consider Russian ice slides the forerunners of roller coasters. But we do know one thing: that mind-clearing adrenaline buzz you only get from being scared out of your wits is a timeless human endeavor. It’s difficult to trace the origins of the thrill ride - for all we know, Stonehenge is just the ruined supports for an early roller coaster. ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 3-SOAKED EXPANSION PACK.ROLLER COASTER TYCOON-CORKSCREW FOLLIES.RISE OF NATIONS EXPANSION-THRONES & PATRIOTS.REALMS OF ARKANIA III-SHADOWS OVER RIVA.RAILKING MODEL RAILROAD SIMULATOR ENCYCLOPEDIA.
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