At the end of November last year I went on a two-day visit with the European Coaster Club to Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. It remained something of a thing that sat on my backburner for quite a while to write up about.

While the entire visit deserves a full writeup, I can’t really muster the effort. I will however make this little picture album post about one of the highlights of the trip, going backstage on the 111 year old wooden coaster Rutschebanen.

This coaster predates the invention of the upstop wheel, so it requires a brakeman to manually regulate the train’s speed to keep it from flying off the tracks. After an hour of us ECC members having an exclusive ride session before it opened for the day, we were then given a guided tour behind the scenes of this coasters by one of the brakemen.

The coaster itself is an absolute airtime machine. I found myself often going first Woooo… as the train crested a hill, then …ooo-Ooof as I was slammed back down into the hard wooden seat.

One of the trains in the maintenance workshop. I asked our guide if he was able to tell the 5 trains apart just by feel when maneuvering them and he said ‘Absolutely’.

Part of the track blueprint. In the middle you can see a switch where the trains can be diverted to the left, into the workshop (the crosshatched area).

The coaster’s lift hill uses a steel cable that the trains grab onto. Here is a previously used cable that suffered some sort unpleasant-to-untangle failure. Our guide explained that Rutchebanen is THE attraction of the park. Many Danes have formative memories of this being their first ever roller coaster, something that they maybe remember riding together with their parents when they were young. If the coaster is out of order, this becomes reason for people demanding their money back. No other attraction evokes such a response when it is closed due to technical issues.

You cannot see it in the youtube video I linked above, but some of the tunnels where the track turns around have animal props standing around. I guess the polar bear heads need frequent replacing?

The machine room. The motor originally served at the docks and was made some time in the 60’s, but they do not know the exact year of manufacture.

The coaster was open to the public as we were given the tour, providing some interesting angles to observe it.

The trip was great fun! I will take a moment to list a few other highlights:

• The Christmas decor of Tivoli is bar none. They go all-in on lighting up the place.

• We had an exclusive ride session on the B&M coaster Dæmonen, just before midnight after the park had officially closed. I rode it back-to-back 8 times, with one of those rides departing on Saturday and arriving back in the station on First Advent Sunday as the bells of Copenhagen City Hall struck midnight. Very cool in both meanings of the word as the late November midnight in Copenhagen is not particularly toasty.

• The Tivoli hotel was probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever been to.

I’m locked in for two ECC trips this summer - one where we will ride every operating coaster in Finland, and one that tours some major parks of Poland. I’m pretty stoked!