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VANCOUVER - Nina Fraley shivered in the morning mist. She studied a rickety-looking contraption, lifting her head high to gaze at the top of a wooden hill.
A train filled with squealing children slowly rolled past, before climbing the steep track, a rhythmic clackety-clack, clackety-clack, counting the rise in elevation.
At the peak, the train noise stopped. The children became quiet.
At 68 feet above the fairgrounds of the Pacific National Exhibition, riders enjoy a panoramic view of mountains and the bridge linking the city to the north shore. The solitude lasts but a second or two, before the train responds, as it must, to the law of gravity, hurtling downward with a hail of shrieks.
The cries brought a smile to Ms. Fraley's face.
“I miss the sound of it,” she said. “I'd go to sleep at night with the sound of the roller coaster ringing in my ears. This takes me home.”
She has been riding coasters for 78 of her 80 years. She is the daughter of legendary coaster designer Carl Phare, who raised three daughters in a home on the grounds of an amusement park in Seattle.
“I got popular in school in the spring,” she said. Classmates were keen to befriend a girl who had a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster in her backyard.
On Tuesday, she attended a ceremony at Playland to mark the 50th birthday of The Coaster, the Vancouver landmark that has left millions of riders scared witless.
A mayoral proclamation was read, cake was served, and, best of all, free coaster rides were on offer. The lineup began in the predawn gloom, a mother and her nine-year-old son at the head. They would be joined by businessmen in suits, schoolchildren on a field trip and an assortment of daredevils and thrill seekers.
About a dozen members of the American Coaster Enthusiasts came to pay homage to a ride they have declared a classic.
“Every single dip on this coaster you get air time,” enthused Steve Gzesh, a Seattle aficionado who has survived 686 coasters in 14 countries. “That bump near the end – that's ejection-seat air time!”
Those who ride the coaster trust in the engineering wizardry of a man who quit school in the sixth grade.
As a boy, Carl Phare supported his poor mother by selling newspapers on the sidewalks of Kansas City. A stint at an amusement park convinced him to head east to work at Coney Island, where he became fascinated by the mechanics of the rides. He learned the science by correspondence courses.
In 1931, he bought a failing, year-old amusement park at Bitter Lake, north of Seattle. He managed to keep it running through the Depression, later designing several remarkable wooden coasters along the West Coast.
His Vancouver coaster is powered by a 75-horsepower engine that hauls the train to the crest of the hill. After those 20 seconds of climbing, the train is in down-bound freefall. No motor. No brakes.
The designer had an imagination. After the first big drop, novice riders assume they have endured the worst. Not so. The drop comes only within three metres of the ground, allowing for an even steeper – and more horrifying, because it is so unexpected – second drop.
The wooden skeleton creaks and groans like an old man, every passing train threatening to reduce the framework to a pile of matchsticks.
The coaster was built of Douglas fir grown at high elevations, making the wood especially durable. Some 300 carpenters and millwrights, among them a pair of Norwegian boat-builders, built the Tinker-toy coaster under the supervision of Walker LeRoy. Born in Ontario at Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), he became renowned for his expertise in building and repairing amusement-park rides.
