Rage is a

steel roller coaster A steel roller coaster is a roller coaster that is defined by having a track made of steel. Steel coasters have earned immense popularity in the past 50 years throughout the world. Incorporating tubular steel track and polyurethane-coated whee ...

situated at Adventure Island in

Southend-on-Sea Southend-on-Sea (), commonly referred to as Southend (), is a coastal city and unitary authority area with borough status in southeastern Essex, England. It lies on the north side of the Thames Estuary, east of central London. It is bordered ...

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...

, England. Rage is a

Gerstlauer Gerstlauer Amusement Rides GmbH is a German manufacturer of stationary and transportable amusement rides and roller coasters, located in Münsterhausen, Germany. History In 1982, Hubert Gerstlauer, a former employee of the Anton Schwarzkopf-o ...

Euro-Fighter The Euro-Fighter is a type of steel roller coaster developed by Gerstlauer. First launched in 2003, the trademark feature of the roller coaster is its beyond-vertical drop, which reaches an angle greater than 90 degrees. Although the majority of E ...

model roller coaster (the 6th overall to be built). At 97 degrees, it is steeper-than-vertical and tied for the third steepest roller coaster in the United Kingdom. it is also tied five ways between itself,

Fahrenheit The Fahrenheit scale () is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736). It uses the degree Fahrenheit (symbol: °F) as the unit. Several accounts of how he originally defined his ...

, Speed: No Limits,

SpongeBob SquarePants Rock Bottom Plunge ''SpongeBob SquarePants Rock Bottom Plunge'' is a Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter roller coaster located at Nickelodeon Universe in the Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota. Standing 74.5 feet tall, it is the tallest roller coaster in the park. It a ...

Typhoon A typhoon is a mature tropical cyclone that develops between 180° and 100°E in the Northern Hemisphere. This region is referred to as the Northwestern Pacific Basin, and is the most active tropical cyclone basin on Earth, accounting for a ...

, and

Vild-Svinet Vild-Svinet (Danish for The Wild Boar) is a steel roller coaster at BonBon-Land in southern Zealand, Denmark, approximately from Copenhagen. Vild-Svinet is the prototype for the Gerstlauer Euro-Fighter roller coaster model. At 97 degrees, the co ...

History and description

Werner Stengel Werner Stengel (born 22 August 1936, in Bochum) is a German roller coaster designer and engineer. Stengel is the founder of Stengel Engineering, also known as Ingenieurbüro Stengel GmbH (or Ingenieurbuero Stengel GmbH). Stengel first worked on a ...

, the coaster opened on 10 February 2007. When it was built, the coaster became the tallest structure in the park and one of the tallest structures in the nearby area. Riders on the coaster are offered expansive views of the nearby

North Sea The North Sea lies between Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. An epeiric sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian S ...

from the Southend-on-Sea beach. The coaster has a total of three inversions: a

vertical loop The generic roller coaster vertical loop, where a section of track causes the riders to complete a 360 degree turn, is the most basic of roller coaster inversions. At the top of the loop, riders are completely inverted. History The vertical ...

, a

cutback Cutback or Cutbacks may refer to: * Cutback technique, a destructive technique for determining certain optical fiber transmission characteristics * Cutback (surfing move) * Cutback (roller coaster), a roller coaster inversion similar to a corkscr ...

and a

heartline roll Roller coaster elements are the individual parts of roller coaster design and operation, such as a track, hill, loop, or turn. Variations in normal track movement that add thrill or excitement to the ride are often called "thrill elements". Com ...

. The coaster also has a

helix A helix () is a shape like a corkscrew or spiral staircase. It is a type of smooth space curve with tangent lines at a constant angle to a fixed axis. Helices are important in biology, as the DNA molecule is formed as two intertwined helices, ...

near the end of the ride. As with other Euro-Fighter model coasters, the coaster has trains that consist of individual cars. Riders in these cars are in two rows of four, for a total of 8 riders. The base of the coaster is by . The coaster layout for Rage is particularly close to two other Euro-Fighter (model 320+) roller coasters:

Falcon Falcons () are birds of prey in the genus ''Falco'', which includes about 40 species. Falcons are widely distributed on all continents of the world except Antarctica, though closely related raptors did occur there in the Eocene. Adult falcons ...

Duinrell Duinrell is an amusement park situated in Wassenaar, Netherlands. Its main character is Rick the Frog. It also contains a caravan park and a camp-site. A variety of accommodation is also available including lodges, tents and static caravans. Bike ...

amusement park and Untamed at

Canobie Lake Park Canobie Lake Park is an amusement park in Salem, New Hampshire, located about north of Boston. It was founded as a trolley park on the shore of Canobie Lake in 1902. Three local families currently run the park, which draws visitors from throug ...

Reviews

In 2009,

Andy Akinwolere Odunayo Andrew Akinwolere (born 30 November 1982), previously known as Andy Akinwolere, is a British television presenter. Early life Akinwolere was born in Ibadan, Nigeria in 1982, and moved to the United Kingdom with his family when he was ei ...

, a presenter for the

Children's BBC BBC Children's and Education is the BBC division responsible for media content for children in the UK. Since the launch of specially dedicated television channels in 2002, the services have been marketed under two brands. CBBC (short for Chil ...

show ''

Blue Peter ''Blue Peter'' is a British children's television entertainment programme created by John Hunter Blair. It is the longest-running children's TV show in the world, having been broadcast since October 1958. It was broadcast primarily from BBC Tel ...

'', rated Rage as the "most thrilling roller coaster" in the United Kingdom. Akinwolere, who wore a

heart monitor A heart rate monitor (HRM) is a personal monitoring device that allows one to measure/display heart rate in real time or record the heart rate for later study. It is largely used to gather heart rate data while performing various types of ph ...

to record his physiological reactions, reported that the coaster was "less scary than other rides, but... fferedreally intense excitement all the way through."

Incidents

Rage attracted media attention when

crow A crow is a bird of the genus ''Corvus'', or more broadly a synonym for all of ''Corvus''. Crows are generally black in colour. The word "crow" is used as part of the common name of many species. The related term "raven" is not pinned scientifical ...

s began nesting near the very top of the tall roller coaster. Despite the fact that the nest was mere inches from the track itself, engineers at the park examined the nest and its location and determined that the nest's location did not pose a threat to coaster riders or the birds. The crows were also observed to be seemingly undisturbed by the coaster's operation.

References

External links

{{commons category-inline Roller coasters introduced in 2007 Roller coasters in the United Kingdom