Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach & Joyland

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England, UK – Sunday, June 13th, 2010

“My, isn’t that interesting how the spinning tub is guided along through the side-friction track? I’m going to take a picture of that!”

Although I was not talking to anyone in particular, I would have to speak loudly and make my innocent intentions with my camera known to all. After my incident at Adventure Island (which isn’t even really a children’s park) I was afraid how I might be perceived at Joyland, an actual children’s park intended pretty much for the under-eight crowd. Even the proprietor of the hotel I was staying at seemed completely baffled that the third park I was referring to for my visit in Great Yarmouth was the kiddy playground near the Britannia Pier; how on earth could someone like me have any interest in a place like that?

“It’s amazing to consider that this is the last remaining Virginia Reel style ride left in the world! As you can tell by my accent, that’s something that’s actually worth traveling a long ways for some people! I’m certainly much more interested in riding the roller coasters than I am in sodomizing your children! And really, I mean – get over yourselves – your kids aren’t that cute anyway!”

My plan either worked brilliantly or did absolutely nothing… in either case the results were the same and I was free to take pictures and video without any objections by parents or security.

I knew Joyland was going to small, but I wasn’t expecting something that could fit inside the property lines of a Pizza Hut. Yet amazingly there are at least two (maybe three) roller coasters crammed into this small space along with a few other dark rides and other funky relics and knick-knacks. Most of Joyland seems pretty much unmodified since the 1950’s, the whimsical fantasyland props mixed with the salty boardwalk environment combine into a potent concoction that’s hard to resist cracking a smile after taking in. The rides all take one token and each token costs £1 a piece, and there are a few machines scattered around that take your coins and dispense tokens in place.

Taking a stairway to an upper level ‘tree house’ which seemed more recently modernized (reminiscent of Seuss Landing’s playful styrofoam, done British Boardwalk style) was the first coaster, the Spook Express. With an interesting location set over the rest of the park and a layout that navigated around and through the colorful centerpiece, one might have reasonably expected good things from this children’s coaster. Sadly that was not to be the case, as the layout was nothing more than a flat counterclockwise helix wrapped around three times with minimal elevation change, and the interior of the tunnels were all completely barren, nothing to spook us save for the dark concrete echoes.

To make up for the underperformance of the Spook Express, the Tyrolean Tubtwist was more than willing to exceed my expectations. While it’s a fairly flat ride that might beg the question as to whether it even qualifies as a roller coaster, there’s no question that, whatever it is, it is one of the most exuberantly insane spinning amusement rides you will find in the world. You have to hop over the rim of the tub to access the leather bench ring in which restraining devices have remained foreign concept. The ride is then powered uphill by an onboard motor running against an electrified strip of metal beneath the car. Upon reaching the top it rolls with some further assistance by the motor down a series of switchbacks set between props and bushes. The tub starts spinning wildly, but the real insanity is in how it feels like something could go wrong at any moment. When the vehicle slams around a switchback there’s almost no guessing what direction you’ll be facing at the moment of impact and it would seem easy to send you sailing across or out of the tub if caught unprepared. Given that vehicle’s guide wheels have a few inches of slack inside the side-friction trough it’s easy to feel the entire car knock back and forth against the barriers depending on how your weight happens to be distributed. It all makes for an extremely disorienting, nerve-wracking ride, one that is quite frankly worth the long-distance trip to Great Yarmouth for.

I had one token left to decide what to do with it. While another cycle on the Tubtwist might have been tempting, I instead elected to spend it on the Snails, partly because it looked interesting with its Lewis Carroll anthropomorphic British snail vehicles and an electrified course wrapping along gardens with all manner of hedges and ceramic gnomes. But also because I wasn’t sure if it would also count toward my list of coasters ridden worldwide, as some sites had listed it as such. Like the Tubtwist, regardless of what you want to call it, what it is is undoubtedly a fun, cute little ride you wouldn’t be able nor want to find anywhere else in the world outside of England, and worth my £1.

I was willing to give the Snails the benefit of the doubt at the time and declare that it is a coaster (there’s a series of small drops near the end of the layout that are gravity driven), but have since decided to pull a Pluto and revoke its status. What counts as a coaster is generally a pretty tricky subject among enthusiasts and has inspired a lot of debates. Most attempts to define properties that are necessary and/or sufficient for a device to be a ‘roller coaster’ seem to be at the inclusion or exclusion of rides that common sense would dictate don’t belong. I’ve since then come up with a method that favors simple intuition over increasingly complex checklists, but also requires a greater degree of consistency across judges that simple intuition can’t provide. I’ll call it something like the “categorical method” of coaster evaluation. Basically how it works is you define several categories of rides, and then treat each attraction as a credit in one and only one of those categories. I think the major categories would be something like this: Roller Coaster, Dark Ride, Water Ride, Car Ride, Flat Ride, Tower Ride, and maybe a few others. Pretending that I am as passionate about collecting credits in each of these categories as I am roller coasters, if I could only credit the Snail to one category which would it be? Intuition would tell me it’s a ‘Car Ride’ before a ‘Roller Coaster’. So even if shares qualities with a roller coaster or dark ride, categorically it remains a car ride first and foremost. What about Tyrolean Tubtwist? Nothing that intense deserves to be called a ‘Car Ride’ just because it’s electrically powered at times, and none of the other categories fit so ‘Roller Coaster’ is what I file it under as being of primary essence. Simple, right?

(Actually it’s not so simple. While it works well for coasters (I was able to use it to easily argue that all powered coasters do count towards my list while flumes or dark rides with dropping sections don’t), I found that if I were to treat all categories equally I had more tricky scenarios where my intuition was that a ride is simultaneously dark ride and water ride. This method also is clearly begging the questions “what categories are to be used?” and “how do you define the properties belonging to each category?” But for the moment it’s still the best and easiest method of credit-counting I’ve got when it comes to ‘miscellaneous’ rides.)

I got a cheap lunch on the Britannia Pier which could possibly be classified as another amusement park located in Great Yarmouth if only it didn’t commit the fatal sin of having no roller coasters and thus no RCDb entry, making it essentially invisible for coaster enthusiasts the world over. (I was disappointed to find that it does in fact turn up on the RCDb owing to some kiddy coaster that’s been gone since at least 1996.) It would be debatable to classify as an amusement park anyway as some slides, kiddie flats, a bumper car and a ghost train are all that’s present, the pier primarily there for food and live entertainment, as well as a nice, close view of the sea.

I had been dawdling somewhat over my deliberations on where to get the best food for the lowest price, or do I spend the money on the Snails or risk missing a potential credit (sometimes the weight of being autonomous in the world is too much!) and so I arrived about a mile down the promenade at the Pleasure Beach later than I should have planned, and therefore experienced more waiting deliberations over whether I should just buy individual tickets or get a wristband good for only the 2½ hours left before the rides close. I chose a wristband because I knew if I did individual tickets I would skimp out and just make my time a quick credit-grabbing session which was not what I had come here for.

I made my first ride the Haunted Hotel, an indoor dark ride I honestly recall almost nothing from but I think I felt was satisfying at the time. While if I had more time I would have done rides like the Disk’O or the Log Flume (with its strange, ornate support structures) I instead move on right to the big guns. The Evolution caught my eye as a delirious contraption that I should have to test myself on, especially as I had never been on one of these before. First I would have to test my patience as we waited what seemed to be a good ten minutes to get enough other riders before starting a cycle. Then, strapped in, flipped on our backs, rotating both around the end of the arm and upside-down by the arm itself, I got to test the security of my pockets and glasses which threatened freefall. And finally, with a solid five minutes of nonstop flipping and spinning 100 feet in the air, I got to test the strength of my gag reflex, which I managed to tough out until the carrier once again touched down on the platform (the way I saw it, food was too expensive to simply lose like that).

Despite these pretenses, I was honestly only at Pleasure Beach for one thing. I pretty much stayed put on the Roller Coaster for the rest of my two hours at Pleasure Beach, taking only a single break from the ride to seek shelter from a light rain on the monorail ride (also allowing some very close-up pictures of the Roller Coaster), as well as to get a ride on the Waltzer, a British variant on the Tilt-a-Whirl (sans clamshell cars but with a decorated roof over the top) that I felt would be inexcusable if I failed to ride while in the country. It was a decent flat ride but invariably would have been much better if I weren’t one of only three people on the entire ride. Also, since they were holding the Roller Coaster train at the station for so long to collect a sufficient number of riders, I at one point had enough time to grab a cycle on the Big Apple coaster without missing a dispatch on the Roller Coaster, adding another notch to my belt.

And as for the Roller Coaster…

1932. Side friction. Brakeman operated. Original signage and dressings. No seat belts. 3½ minutes long. Manna from heaven.

To describe the Roller Coaster in terms of what it is: Pull down the lapbar, noting that it stops ratcheting a foot or two above any potential laps. The brakeman releases the lever and we slowly roll out of the station cluttered with hand painted signs and along the transfer track. The three-car train with five benches per car engages a chain lift which pulls us to the top while affording views of the seaside. We dive down a small first drop and pull back up for a turnaround surveying the city of Great Yarmouth. The train plummets down its longest and steepest drop, closely cutting beneath the superstructure. Curling along another long curve at the top of the next hill, I wonder how such long cars manage to navigate over this track, as it seems some special suspension and pivoting wheel bogey is used. A double hill is followed, the middle drop even providing a boost of negative-g’s for those in the very back row, made all the sweeter by the absence of anything keeping us tethered to the seat. Another bookending turnaround set inside the superstructure, another dip with a long pullout at the bottom, another turnaround passing by the giant “Great Yarmouth” lettering on the blue structure paneling. Twice more we dip, scurry around a final turn, and conclude with a bunny hop with no airtime. As we skid off speed every local patron is hopping onto the unload platform before forward movement has been completely ceased. Now do it again.

To describe the Roller Coaster in terms of what it means: To exist in tandem in space and time with the Roller Coaster means to recognize one’s self as privileged to become a part in a story that far exceeds the limits of their own subjective reality. As you repeat the experience once, twice, five times, ten, twenty times, every detail becomes part of a tapestry that’s impossibly large to describe. There are the little bumps in the track as you pass over the railroad-like switches for the transfer, the feel of the wet sea air as you’re pulled up the lift towards and overcast sky, or the cold metal bar your arm rests on as you wait to throw your hands up over the first drop. The little shuffling of the steel wheels along each curve, the momentary rush of wooden supports on a drop that are too fast for your eye to catch, the green traffic light positioned at each curve that has the potential of turning red on the next ride telling the brakeman to stop but it never does. How glad I am to simply ride a scenic railway freed from the same cost and stress it took to get a single ride on my last two.

A thousand other pieces of sense data become familiar friends after enough repetition. Each one a feather light existence as at one moment is seems the most real, important thing on earth, the next moment fluttering away into distant, secret memories never to be unlocked by even a million words. You wonder how many of these fleeting secrets you share with the brakeman, and then realize just how many more the brakeman must have that you will never discover despite the actuality of the full experience staring you directly in the eye at every moment. Across generations of brakemen, what is the sum of their total stories above these rails? How many stories on earth exist within this creaking, weather-worn structure that no human in history has ever been privy to? How many have yet to be discovered by future brakemen and riders, and how much of the Roller Coaster’s story will die with the universe? A single lap around the tracks is at once vastly larger than one’s finite comprehension will allow, and yet the narrowest, microscopic slice of a history that stretches far beyond even that. Doomed to eternal return, each moment begins to weigh so heavily it becomes impossible to know where to look, how to sit, when to breath and when to scream.

Eventually it ceases to matter. In the face of the infinity of possibilities we don’t fall in love with that which would have been in the ideal universe, we fall in love with that which has somehow landed in our laps by absolute improbable chance. Such as it is with the Roller Coaster, a flawed ride that couldn’t be more perfect any other way than as it is.

There might even be a little lesson or two about life somewhere in there, maybe.

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