Swinging
For just a moment, let’s leave behind the dense forests of Virginia and fly to the Midwest, right along the Ohio River. In 1980, Kings Island near Cincinnati was working closely with Arrow, too. Still riding the wave of success its Corkscrew model had brought, Arrow would have years of designing corkscrewing and looping classics ahead of them…
But in the meantime, Arrow engineers also had a wildly exciting new concept they’d been hoping to get off the ground, and only a large, modern thrill park like Kings Island (hot on the heels of opening their own forest-dwelling icon, The Beast) could build the full-scale operational prototype they needed…
The new coaster model, which they called a “suspended coaster,” would look quite a bit different from everything that came before. For one thing, as its name implied, the roller coaster cars would hang down from the track above. But most incredibly, those suspended cars would be hanging from jointed arms, able to sway side-to-side at each bend in the track, banking and slaloming along the ride’s course.
The idea was phenomenal and groundbreaking. The prototype at Kings Island? Not so much. The Bat roller coaster opened in 1981 and by 1984, it was gone.
Coaster aficionados would do well to explore the surprisingly frank, in-depth history of The Bat written by John Keeter on Kings Island’s own official blog, but the long and short is that The Bat (like many Arrow coasters) was built in an era before computer simulations could precisely anticipate the force and stress on each square inch of track.
As a result, the track of The Bat was insufficiently banked around turns and twists. As a result, tremendous stress was applied to each swinging cab’s shock absorbers as it swung left and right, allegedly requiring near-daily replacements of train hardware. The novel engineering feat of suspending cars beneath the track also allegedly caused substantial issues with the ride’s chain lift system and braking system, where imprecise alignment would see fins lodged or bent in pinching mechanisms due to the trains’ unpredictable angles upon entry.
Plagued by continuous downtime and clearly unsustainable in its operations, The Bat enjoyed just three seasons of temperamental operations before Kings Island officials pulled the plug. (Arrow returned to the same plot of land in 1987 to build a much different roller coaster – the multi-looping Vortex – which even re-used the Bat’s Victorian bell tower station and even famously left suspended-track station cut-outs and concrete footings in tact. Vortex also lasted a long longer, closing after more than three decades, in 2019.)
But of course, the only true failure can come if you quit. So even with The Bat pulled down, Arrow didn’t abandon its quest to develop a suspended coaster. Just the opposite, Arrow engineers apparently acknowledged Kings Island’s ride as the prototype it was and declared that they would learn from its mistakes in their next installation…
And given that plans for a similarly suspended coaster at Busch Gardens Williamsburg had been foiled by Schwarzkopf’s bankruptcy, Arrow had just the place to prove themselves…
In March 1984, Kings Island announced that The Bat would officially be closed for the entirety of the 1984 summer season while a few hardware modifications were tested on the ride. (That November, they’d concede that the ride was unfixable, announcing it was closed forever, having unknowingly given its last rides at the end of the 1983 season). But as The Bat sat silently in Cincinnati awaiting the wrecking ball, something even more ferocious was coming to life in Williamsburg…
I think you need to update the article to include information about The Wolf’s Revenge, the B&M family invert made as a spiritual successor to the original.