Designer Times
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18. The Matterhorn
To better understand the development of the Matterhorn Bobsled Ride, first refer to the July 11, 2001 Designer Times No. 15 "Four Big Projects - All at One Time - Everything at Once for1959". Also pages 59-72, "Inventing The Modern Roller Coaster" in Robert Reynolds book "Roller Coasters, Flumes and Flying Saucers", the story of Arrow Development.
Walt gave me some bobsled photos to work from so I could design a bobsled body to fit on whatever track and chassis design that would be developed by Arrow Development, who had been given the go-ahead to engineer and build the Matterhorn Ride System to be based on our conceptual designs. I patterned the Matterhorn guest seating design after the Swiss bobsled arrangement. This allowed folks to snuggle together, a plan that later was to prove delightful to young couples. We sent my bobsled sketches up to Arrow for them to mock-up a full size car shape.
When I finished the bobsled design for Arrow, my boss, Roger Broggie told me to start a track layout to fit inside the "styling shape" of the Matterhorn Mountain model that Fred Joerger had built in the Studio Model Shop. Both Arrow and the Disney Studio Machine shop started some ride design testing to find the best track arrangement. I tried a steel angle iron design based on the prevailing flat steel bar and wooden beams of existing roller coasters. Our test results in September 1958 showed that this design would be near impossible to build. Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon at Arrow came up with the bent steel pipe idea which would be real fast to build. They could now configure a car chassis and pipe track section in one integrated design.
Meantime, Arrow gave me some preliminary coaster track calculations based on the Santa Cruz Mouse Ride. The trick was to determine the "neutral slope" for the Matterhorn track. The neutral slope is the amount of downgrade on the track that will maintain an average speed of a car in motion on the track without any change in velocity. This slope also defines the maximum height of each hill so that the car will continue it's travel down the track. Obviously the dips will produce a much faster speed, but the limiting factor is the neutral slope hill heights.
Working with Arrow's preliminary calculations, I started laying out both the A & B track courses. I was beginning to learn that roller coaster designing is real tricky. The old wooden coaster guys had spent years of experimentation to get it right. But Disney was going to design, build, and test this new steel Matterhorn coaster for an opening in just 10 months.
Many coaster dynamics are variable; speed based on up and down slopes, banking required in turns, bank change rates, variable guest weights, etc. I had to figure on variable friction coefficients depending on how long the car has been running, temperature of the day and so forth. This meant that as the track course was being layed out, the speeds had to be calculated based on the course effect on the car. I needed to learn trigonometry real quick....I'd failed geometry one in high school but found I could learn enough trigonometry just from a chart in one afternoon.
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