Gavin said:
Anyone know if Busch Gardens Houston had a log flume?
You bring up a great point. From a quick read
here and
here it seems BG-H didn't have many large rides (only one comment even mentions a roller coaster, which was as he said abandoned, so it was perhaps a small Shwarzkopf with small resale value; which we should take with a grain of salt anyways), further there wasn't a picture of either in the photo album included. This doesn't mean there wasn't a flume there, but we still have no evidence. I can say with some certainty that the Stanley Falls Flume (BGT) opened in 1973 and was the same designer as Le Scoot (if you watch a video, you can see that a lot of the same technologies were used (and another
site hypothesizes this was arrow, which is believable since they did a lot of flumes at that time)
Also, as late as mid-1972, when Stanley Falls Flume would have been contracted at the latest, BG-H was still going strong, or at least hopeful. It wasn't until the end of that season that things had started to look bleak.
TL;DR; With that said I wonder if the park didn't pair up on the contract (A practice the company still seems to employ) for Stanley Falls/BGH-Log Flume, but renege on a planned houston flume (which perhaps was already designed or even manufactured) and had it built instead at BGW when Houston started to fade. I think either of those would be enough to start the rumor. However, the lack of definite answer in something that really isn't that mysterious, does make me doubt the validity also.
It seems odd to me that there is any doubt even amongst park employees, particularly doing the tours who you'd think would be given some ability to find out historical information. Seems like there would a record somewhere that would clear this all up. I don't doubt that it is in some "corporate eye's only" folder somewhere, but it seems someone there could look and find it out. Then again, I guess it's not that important, only interesting, either. The doubt in something that need not be secret does make me doubt the validity of the rumor.
Swiftman said:
Anyway, I imagine the other lift was removed because it was more trouble than it was worth to maintenance. Why maintain two lift motors when you don't have to?
It appears this small climb was small enough as to not need a lift:
http://i.imgur.com/FzB2F.png
netdvn said:
What gets me is that Le Scoot is a terrain ride and moving terrain rides is difficult. If the ride was moved, it had to be modified unless its former home had the exact same terrain as BGW has.
If you think about it, it's not that crazy.
1) The hill near the train station/ eagle's nest and on the back before the mill, the supports are different even though (even supports of the same height), which would make me think they are replacements of the original supports likely to adapt to a different terrain.
2) The basin the lower half of the ride sits in could be built to whatever specification was necessary and tends to have plenty of clearance below the ride.
netdvn said:
The Van Nuys park did have one though. Not sure if that one was moved to Williamsburg or scrapped. I can't seem to find an accurate picture of the layout (just an RCT3 recreation and that looks different from Le Scoot's layout).
I guess Gavin already cleared this question up, but I'll throw this out there too:
This old Van Nuys old timer
posts here that the Van Nuys log flume was tiny, and although he says he believes it went east, I doubt one would describe Le Scoot as tiny.
Edit*3: added a number of more responses from other things I have found. This is sort of fun for me, haha.