Tuesday, Dec. 31, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.
The best part of the Manhattan Express roller coaster ride occurs when you hit the Las Vegas Strip.
You've just come out of a 67 mph, 144-foot dive through the valet parking area -- the fastest, steepest part of the ride -- and you're teetering 152 feet in the air on a banked curve, just to the left of the Statue of Liberty's torch and face to face with the MGM Grand lion.
As the train turns to the north, riders will get a split-second view of the Strip before entering the disorienting two inversions offered by the candy-colored red track that grows out of the roof of the New York-New York hotel-casino, which opens Thursday.
The first loop is standard roller-coaster fare, a head-over-heels somersault that has been around since Six Flags Magic Mountain introduced inverted coasting with the Revolution back in the '70s.
The second inversion is the heartline twist and dive, a piece of track that is unique to the Manhattan Express. As the coaster climbs out of the vertical loop, the right side of the track dips into a half twist, producing a barrel roll. Riders are suspended upside down 86 feet high from the coaster's road wheels for an instant before the train pulls out of the inversion by curling back underneath itself.
Few have experienced the sensation produced by that maneuver since no other ride offers anything like it.
In most inverted tracks, centrifugal forces keep the rider snug in the seat. On this one, the passengers ride like Legos in a box that is suddenly turned upside down -- only, hopefully, these Legos are secured with a shoulder harness.
"In a heartline spin, you roll over an axis that passes through the center of your body," said Walt Davis, explaining the technical side of the track. "Heartline ... it sounds a little more poetic than a belly-button roll."
Davis, a vice president with Togo International Inc., a Cincinnati, Ohio-based subsidiary of Togo Japan, and one of about 150 engineers who had a hand in designing the Manhattan Express in the last two years, said the Las Vegas ride isn't the company's first dabblings with the heartline. Viper, a coaster Togo built for Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, incorporates two full heartline spins.
The unique characteristic of the Manhattan Express track is the half twist followed by the dive.
"Most people who have ridden the Viper love the heartline elements," Davis said. "It's a little bit aggressive. Teenagers really go for it."
The Manhattan Express, meanwhile, is designed to be more family friendly. It's fast enough to excite the enthusiast, but tame enough for Mom, Dad and the kids to give it a try.
Another unconventional characteristic of the coaster is that the trains aren't very long. Davis said the taxicab motif yellow trains with a black and white checkerboard stripe are only four cars long, with each car holding four passengers. Davis explained that a shorter train is necessary to negotiate some of the ride's acrobatics.
To compensate for the 16-passenger-per-ride capacity, the track is capable of handling five trains at once. With each ride lasting just under four minutes, the coaster is capable of serving just more than 1,000 passengers an hour.
New York-New York officials say they don't intend to run five trains at once. Davis said having that many available should help with maintenance scheduling.
"This ride was designed for broad appeal," Davis said. "I think it will be scary enough and fast enough to encourage repeat rides. But I think older folks will love it too because it has longer site lines ... you'll be able to anticipate what's going to happen to you. All the height and speed and inversion elements combine to make it an exciting ride."
Gary Primm, chief executive for Primadonna Resorts Inc., one of the partners in the New York-New York project, agrees.
"It won't have the same kind of speed the Desperado has," Primm said, comparing the New York-New York attraction to the 215-foot coaster at Buffalo Bill's on the California-Nevada border.
"But it will have that one-of-a-kind heartline configuration," said Primm, who modestly admits it was his idea to build such a visible attraction. "And, it will be right on the Strip, so that's bound to attract attention. Steve (Wynn) has the volcano; we have the Manhattan Express."
Ironically, it was Togo that recently completed design and construction of a roller coaster in Japan that has supplanted the Desperado as the world's tallest. But Primm said Manhattan Express will provide the same kind of hook that Desperado offers Buffalo Bill's. With the Strip as a stage, the number of visits generated by the roller coaster should be exponentially greater.
Although only sandbags have ridden the Express so far, roller coaster enthusiasts already have checked in with their comments, pro and con, in Internet forums.
Most of the comments express disappointment that the coaster isn't going to be as wild and woolly as they had hoped.
Some enthusiasts offered engineering suggestions on how the coaster could have been built taller, longer and faster, with most of the criticism focusing on the ride's first hill, which drops only 75 feet, banking slightly to the left as it drops.
Kip Ross, a high school freshman from Ellicott City, Md., said the first hill at least provides some momentum for the biggest drop so the train has a head of steam going into its maximum velocity.
But he's sold on Togo as being a premier ride designer. "Togo doesn't do a lot in this country, so when we get one, we're lucky," he said.
He's right. The Express is only the sixth U.S. coaster built by the company that designed the world's first steel coaster in Asia in 1953.
Eric Traube, who classifies himself a coaster fanatic and is on staff at the University of Michigan, saw the coaster being tested from his hotel room at the Excalibur during a recent visit to Las Vegas.
"Unfortunately, I was not as impressed with the Manhattan Express' appearance as other people were, especially given that there were only a couple of loops in it," Traube wrote via e-mail.
"Don't get me wrong -- it looks fun -- but after riding coasters much bigger in scope than the Express, with larger drops, more loops and presumably a lot faster speeds, it is more of a 'unique' coaster in that it's built around the hotel than a 'Wow, what a ride' coaster.
"It also didn't appear to move as fast as I expected, and the trains were shorter than I'm used to. Once again, looks can be deceiving in terms of how much fun a ride is. I enjoyed the coaster in the Circus Circus (Grand Slam Canyon) dome quite a lot, especially with all the scenery around it, even though it was quite tame by big coaster standards."
Enthusiasts will get their first chance to climb aboard at 10 a.m. Friday. The loading station is at the north end of the property and rides are $5 each. Casino officials say they expect the ride to be open longer than usual during the first few days of operation, but normally will run daily from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
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