Six Flags America: Abandoned, Backstage, and Closed
We went to Six Flags America last weekend, and went on all the usual rides and took the usual pictures. However, while we were taking a train ride around the park (which goes through the park and through the woods behind the park), we decided to try to capture all of the things which aren’t in plain sight from the rest of the park, and then expanded that to cover various other disused rides and property…
These are weighted dummies that get strapped into roller coasters for safety testing, when they need the weight of the passengers in the cars but don’t want to risk real people. They’re within the park (for easy access, I suppose), but behind a building so they’re easy to miss.
This is an abandoned station. Q thinks that it was for the old Two Face roller coaster, which was taken down years ago. There’s a fence around it, so we weren’t able to get a good picture of it from the train, but we were able to find one place on foot where we could get a clear shot. If you weren’t looking for it, you could spend the day in the park and never notice it.
This is a parking lot in the backstage area, which can only be seen (by the general public) from the train ride. The lot has old ride cars that aren’t in use anymore, and the Batmobile (when it’s not on display in the Gotham City part of the park).
More backstage storage. I had to stand up on the train (which you’re not supposed to do) to get a shot over the fence. There are a variety of things, including a hot dog stand and turkey leg stand, left out here when they’re not being used. (Some of them I don’t recall ever seeing used.)
It’s hard to get a good shot of the various things concealed by trees and brush (especially from a moving train); but up there on the hill is part of the haunted path through the woods from Fright Fest.
Here we passed by an employee parking lot. We got to park there for free last fall when Q worked at Fright Fest. The vending machines in the employee area are not vastly overpriced like the ones in the park.
Decapitated Joker and Daffy Duck in bondage.
There is a picnic pavillion behind the park, for rental by families and groups and accessible by the train (it stops at a station back there, even when no event is being held; but only those with special armbands can disembark there). Right now it’s empty, and also being used for storage. Various boats, roller coaster cars, and other paraphernalia are underneath some of the pavillions.
There’s also a playground back there for children to use while the groups are gathered to picnic. Note that even the rides that are open and in use often look spooky and abandoned when seen in the distance through the woods like this.
Also stored in the woods: concrete statues of the Looney Tunes in togas, living as gods.
Right in the park proper is the climbing wall, but it’s been closed for some time. (After taking all of those pictures of abandoned properties from the train ride, I decided to expand the photo essay to include closed and disused items within the park as well.)
Unused cars for The Wild One roller coaster.
We took a second train ride to get pictures of things we’d missed the first time through (or to just try to get better pictures). The first time through one of us shot only pictures from the right side of the train and the other shot from the left side. The second time, we switched sides. Anyway, on side tracks, here are a couple of other trains that used to pull the cars that we were riding. The one on top looked like the train we were using; the second (“Beatrice”) was more of an old-fashioned steam engine. (There were also a couple of older passenger cars off to the side.)
One of a couple of stages near the pavillion area.
This disused tower, with only one track leading up to it, is part of the remains of a ride which used to stand where the Apocalypse roller coaster is now. The old ride was a pirate-themed water ride, and parts of it were recycled in the rapids ride, the log flume ride, and the Apocalypse (which re-used the skull façade). The disused tower is behind the façade and only visible from a couple of places (including the train). We’d never noticed it before because, sitting right beside the Apocalypse as it does, if you caught a glimpse of it you’d probably just think it was part of the Apocalypse. I have no idea why it hasn’t been taken down yet, probably because they had no other use for it and nowhere better to put it. (Q was reading up on some of the older rides from the park and found a video someone had shot from the old pirate ship ride. We recognized elements from it in the various other rides listed above; but we don’t recall ever riding it because Richard was just a baby back when it still stood.)
The aforementioned rapids (the first two pictures) and log flume ride (the third picture). These rides are still closed, as it’s not yet warm enough for water rides. (Oddly enough, The Penguin’s Blizzard River appeared to be in operation last weekend, though. It also stayed open last year long after the other water rides had closed.)
The Hurricane Harbor water park, part of Six Flags America (which was originally a water park before it expanded and was bought out by Six Flags), won’t be open until some time in May. Only some of it is visible from the rest of the park (especially from the top of the taller rides, or from the parking lot), but these water slides are right at the border between the water park and the rest of the park.
These are a couple of disused gasoline-powered cars from one of the rides, and they are usually parked in an area which is accessible only in the fall (it’s where the hay ride and trick-or-treating are held).
In the Looney Tunes area, they replaced the concrete slabs with the names and faces of the Looney Tunes characters with these flat and featureless concrete squares.