Spring is quickly approaching which can only mean one thing… It’s almost time to ride Iron Gwazi! RMC crews have been working at a feverish pace to complete the new coaster, so let’s take a look!
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We’ll start off by taking an aerial look at the ride, thanks to this awesome photo from Jason McLemore Media. (Be sure to check out Jason’s Facebook page for lots more aerials of Iron Gwazi!) This photo was taken in the early afternoon on Sunday, March 8th, and as you can see, there were only a couple of track pieces left to install at that time. It’s likely that track-work might be complete at the time of this article’s publishing!
One of our favorite places to photograph Iron Gwazi from is the Skyride, so we took a quick ride across the Serengeti and got some great views of the recently completed stall.
Crews have spent the last few weeks installing dozens of steel supports throughout Iron Gwazi’s layout – you can see several of them in the photo below supporting the ride’s insane looking outward banked first turn.
Getting closer to the ride, we noticed several RMC crew members were actively inspecting a few different areas of the track. The photo below really puts the twisty-ness and scale of this element into perspective!
The Iron Gwazi sign(s) were also installed last month – this was my first time seeing them in person and boy do they look great!
As we inch closer and closer to Spring, we are eagerly awaiting the park to announce when Iron Gwazi will open. We absolutely can’t wait to photograph trains going down this drop! Hopefully we see full circuit testing begin within the next week!
And lastly, now that the layout of the ride is basically complete, we though it would be fun to compare the layout of the original Gwazi with Iron Gwazi. Thanks to a foundation permit filed with the City of Tampa last October, we were able to overlay the layouts of the old ride and the new ride so you can see how they re-used footers and combined the existing structures into one massive new ride!
[twenty20 img1=”42361″ img2=”42362″ offset=”0.5″ before=”Gwazi Layout” after=”Iron Gwazi Layout”]