Man seeing all the structural quirks of the ride from that angle really opens up just how messed up that ride really was. The more of these pictures I see the more amazed I am it even lasted as long as it did.
Some ride engineers I talked with in the 90s (from non-Arrow ride vendors, notably) actually marveled at length about the massive and apparently spectacular welds in DF’s lift hill structure and elsewhere around the ride. They were pretty impressed with the volume of material and the configurations they saw in the ride’s supports, which went above and beyond what they would have specified. (Years later, a couple of younger engineers at Arrow noted that their legacy structural calc methods were quite inaccurate, general suspicion of which may have been why Arrow somewhat overspecified things in the first place when they rolled out this unusual support config for DF.)
Far less impressive was the track design and fabrication, as with all Arrow coasters of the time. Ample evidence for that appears in that lift hill photo. The tops of what Arrow called the “batwing“ (cobra roll) element received those diagonal cross-tie brace reinforcements long after the ride originally opened, as did other large Arrow rides’ inversions. And not just because they were “nice-to-haves.” Oops. Not the most robust of track assemblies; it made some things much easier and other things considerably more complicated than necessary.
The red tracer lights were the future. They looked so damned cool. And during that early 90s era, when we were near our cultural point of Peak Miata and the jellybean design ethos suddenly ruled supreme on the nation’s highways, those trains were sex on rails.
Random aside: DF would have been so much better if it had even one spot of decent airtime. For all the rough moments I remember on that ride, it wasn’t really THAT bad next to its large Arrow peers. But its sole moment of designed-in airtime basically didn’t work, and Busch seemingly had lower tolerance for jarring rides than Kings Dominion or Six Flags or Kennywood. Probably due to guest demographics IMO, though I can’t prove it. Bad combo for a ride that was supposed to delight and entertain at a Busch park.
