Cedar Point 2024

Despite living within a day's drive of one of the world's most famous amusement parks visited by people from around the world, it had been three years since I had last visited Cedar Point. It's a great park, but it was even better to re-discover it after several years. This month's post will be a short trip report showing some of my favorite parts of America's second-oldest amusement park. 

"We apologize for the inconvenience" is in reference to the park's failed 2024 investment, which operated for a total of eight days and was then closed for the rest of the season. A bit more on that later.

Gatekeeper was cleverly designed to interact with the main entrance, and it has these cool "keyhole" moments where the train threads the needle, so to speak.

One vintage ride maintained by Cedar Point is a 1962 Von Roll Sky Ride.

I believe all the gondolas received a fresh paint scheme for this season, and one neat touch they added is the Von Roll logo on the car doors.

In 2003, Cedar Point opened the world's tallest and fastest roller coaster, Top Thrill Dragster. With a complex hydraulic launch system, it was plagued by issues for years until 2021, when a piece of the coaster train flew off and hit someone in line. It was closed indefinitely after that, but in 2023 it was announced that the ride would be reborn as "Top Thrill 2."

The major modification made to the ride was the addition of this "reverse spike" tower. The hydraulic launch system was replaced with a less maintenance-intensive magnetic launch, but that means the train no longer has enough momentum to make it over its 420-foot hill in one go. It now launches forwards, backward up the spike, and then a final time forwards over the main hill, which remains the same as the old ride.

I took these pictures in May, and by then the ride had already been shut down for re-engineering due to problems found with the train wheels. It never reopened for the rest of the season. I don't know what they were expecting by going with Zamperla as the ride's manufacturer, who is notorious for malfunctioning rides and had previously only designed roller coasters as tall as 50 feet or so. It's definitely a bad look for Cedar Point.

Although the park has experienced countless issues with its newest piece of roller coaster technology, one of the earliest modern steel roller coasters continues to operate flawlessly. The Arrow Dynamics-designed Corkscrew opened in 1976 as the first coaster with three inversions. Its maintenance bay is placed under the station with this interesting piece of sloped track to reach it.

You can't go to Cedar Point without riding the Cedar Point and Lake Erie Railroad, and if you board at the Frontier Town station, you'll be treated to a ride through Boneville.

It's been a staple of the ride since it opened in 1963.

In this picture, you can see one of the skeletons falling over in a mock shootout that includes blank gunshots.

The Cedar Creek Mine Ride is a vintage mine train coaster that skims over a small lake next to the train trestle.

You always need a moonshine still for these types of displays.

More gunshots are in this scene. The skeleton on the porch is shooting at another skeleton scurrying over the fence to the left.

Cedar Point debuted an elaborate boat ride in 2021 called Snake River Expedition, yet it only lasted for three years and did not return for 2024. The scenes can still be seen sitting along the waterway in the center of the park. The ride featured several live actors, and it's a shame that they couldn't find a way to make a slower-paced ride like this sustainable. I guess they decided that the crowds only wanted roller coasters.

Only a video clip can do justice to the animation of this tableau.

And with that we're back at the main station!

The Coliseum was built in 1906 and still features an Art-Deco ballroom on its second story. It's a strange time capsule left untouched in the middle of a bustling theme park.

Perhaps Cedar Point's rarest ride is Cedar Downs, a classic derby racer carousel that previously operated at Cleveland's Euclid Beach Park from the 1920s until 1969.

It runs substantially faster than any normal carousel, and the horses jockey back and forth for position during the ride. It's always a treat to take a spin on this huge ride, which sits in the same building it sat in at Euclid Beach.

The first few times I went to Cedar Point, there was an antique car ride in Frontier Town. That ride was retired after 2021, and the bridge that the cars once traveled through was replaced with a walking path. The rest of the ride's plot was replaced with a large restaurant.

Although the park maintains one classic Von Roll Sky Ride, it used to have two. The defunct Frontier Lift ran from the main midway to Frontier Town, and its station remains today. The entrance and exit ramps to the ride remain intact, and I'm sure there are more remnants inside the building itself.

A sentimental favorite of mine is Gemini, a dual-tracked roller coaster built by Arrow that has been in operation since 1978. Its space-frame station is straight out of the 70s. 

This is one of the few coasters where you can still reach out and clap hands with the train you are racing against. During one of my rides, our train blew right through the brake run seen in this picture, while the other train seen here ground to a halt. It was pretty funny watching everyone's faces as they stopped abruptly and we kept coasting along. When we got back to the loading station, the attendants seemed pretty confused as to what happened. Hopefully the stranded riders got down eventually!

Along with practically everyone who visited the park this year, I will have to come back to ride Top Thrill 2. But there are so many more rides to enjoy here than just that.

Before we left, I couldn't help but admire the vintage pennants in the gift shop. Until next time Cedar Point!