It’s called the Screaming Eagle for a reason. It makes you SCREAM!
The Screaming Eagle is one of the two wooden roller coasters at the Six Flags in St. Louis, Missouri. This is the oldest roller coaster at Six Flags St. Louis, being built in April of 1976, but it is still a “goodie”.
The Screaming Eagle is a classic roller coaster. It does not have all of the fancy theme objects that many of today’s roller coasters have; it does not do flips or corkscrews. It is just an old-fashioned rabbit hop and helix wooden roller coaster, and I love it.
There are some things that you might not know about the Screaming Eagle though. This roller coaster at one time held a Guinness Book of World Record for being the longest, tallest and fastest coaster of its time. This coaster contains 3,872 feet of track, has drops of 91 feet high and 87 feet high, and reaches a top speed of 62mph. This looks like nothing by today’s standards with the Kingda Ka at Six Flags New Jersey blasting off at a speed of 128mph, but at it’s opening in 1976 it was a major attraction.
John Allen was the designer of this World Record Breaking Coaster, and he put a lot of details into this coaster because it would be his last. He took the layout for this coaster from a previous coaster that he completed in 1968 called the Shooting Star, except this one was much longer! Next what he wanted to do was make this coaster stand out in the park. This coaster is settled toward the back of the park, but when you are on top of the Superman: Tower of Power, you can really notice this coaster. Why? When John Allen wanted this coaster to pop out in the park, he decided to paint all of the wood a white color and the entire track a red color. Against the green trees and the brown earth, this coaster definitely stood out, a lot more than The Boss, which is painted all in brown.
Before the coaster opened, the park created so much marketing and buzz for this coaster, with the tag line “Come fly the Eagle, unless you’re… chicken???” What a slogan! The guests were awestruck when they were ushered into the station in which the guests were greeted by an eagle with outstretched wings. When the coaster first opened, the guests boarded the five-car, three-bench train, but 1990’s guests board a two-bench tailored car. Then the cars were changed again because in the 1990 season the Boss which has a higher drop then the Screaming Eagle was reaching a top speed of only 66mph, while the Screaming Eagle was topping out at 70mph. It is absurd that the newer roller coaster was reaching top speeds 4mph slower then the 1976 Screaming Eagle. In 1994, the coaster ran backwards, and the three turns were banked, which removed what little laterals the trains had. Also in the original design at the end of the coaster’s ride, John Allen did not want just a regular boring piece of track, which is what it is today. In the original form, the coaster performed a double up before rounding out its last turn. Why? We do not know. The last change that was made to this coaster was the attachment of eagle heads to the front of the trains, slowing down the coaster even more, and making the trains run worse than ever.
Besides all of these changes that were made over the years, the Screaming Eagle will still make you scream. I believe that these changes do not outweigh the two high drops that this coaster is famous for with its amazing speed for its time. I would definitely ride this ride many, many times over.
