MODEL STILL HAS THE RIGHT MOVES
Scaled down roller-coaster, built around 1900, is going from an Orlando collector into hall of fame
Two vintage pieces of amusement-park history have spent decades in a private collection in Orlando, and now they’re among the items on their way to museums dedicated to roller coasters and to carousels.
The National Roller Coaster Hall of Fame in Texas will be home to the first known working model of a coaster. It was created in 1900. And Knoebels Carousel Museum in Pennsylvania will house the oldest known carousel horse in North America, which dates to the late 1800s.
Dick Knoebel, president of Knoebels Amusement Resort purchased these items, and related pieces, from the Orlando collector and then donated them to the museums.
Knoebel “went through the collection, got what he wanted, gave the guy the check, and then we put all the stuff inside a Ryder truck and brought it here,” said Chris Gray, vice president of Orlando-based Skyline Attractions and a board member of the coaster hall. The relics were stored at Skyline, still away from the public eye, while awaiting shipping to their destinations.
The scaled-down coaster model, made of steel, is about 12 feet long and 3 feet tall. Cars can still run the circuit, including a dramatic loop that would have turned riders completely upside down.
The model has a lift chain up the hill, but gravity and momentum are major players. In real life, the ride would have been about 80 feet tall, Gray estimated.
The model was taken to “trade shows because the guy who designed it was trying to sell it … the idea of a loop,” Gray said. It is thought to be the work of Edward Prescott, who also created the Loop the Loop coaster of Coney Island, N.Y., in that era.
The Pennsylvania-bound carousel horse is thought to be the oldest one in North America, Gray said. It may have come from New York City.
It is wooden, gray and looks frail.
“The horse is priceless,” Gray said. (He estimated the coaster model to be worth between $30,000 and $50,000.)
The attractions are getting additional, if less functional, models and other fiberglass carousel horses and a sleigh that offered, for the first time, an alternative to the up-anddown movement of standard merry-go-round horses.
The seller, who remains unidentified, was seeking to downsize. He was an “eclectic collector,” Gray said, but many items were circus- or park-related.