originally posted on 6/30/2025
The May 1989 issue of ACE News selected for the most recent installment of ACE News Switchback prominently featured Hercules at Dorney Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It is perhaps the perfect example of a roller coaster that failed to live up to its promise and potential, breaking not only records when it opened, but likely ribs in its later years, thanks to that jarring and jackhammering banked turn over the lake. These days, enthusiasts may wonder what might have happened had Hercules stuck around long enough for Rocky Mountain Coasters to take a swing at reworking what Charlie Dinn and Curtis Summers had created in 1989, but having experienced the coaster not long after it opened, I remember it being a top ten ride.
Of course, Hercules was never what anyone well-traveled would have considered to be elite — not with that energy-sapping triple-up following the aforementioned skimming of the surface of the lake, the slow and boring turnaround in front of the station and maddening lack of airtime hills along its 4,000 feet of track. When a coaster’s descending hillside approach to its lift hill is celebrated as its best feature, I suppose not much else needs to be said? Yet with that said, the coaster felt truly epic to this 13-year-old in 1991.
My father and I had just finished a day with friends at Dorney Park, and after they departed, we decided we wanted one more ride on Hercules. The line was expectedly long for the park’s main attraction on a Saturday night in the middle of summer, and then some rain shut things down for a bit to make matters worse. We’d waited about two hours when we finally boarded the train around 10 o’clock that evening, and the beast of the midway didn’t disappoint. The Philadelphia Toboggan Company train (no seat 1.3, mind you) absolutely tore through the layout — so much so that it didn’t matter that aside from the first drop, lake turn and surprise plunge beneath the station, there wasn’t a heck of a lot going on. In the darkness of the night, Hercules became our number one coaster.
A similar occurrence took place a year later on a family trip to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio — I suppose you might guess which member of the family pushed for that trip? Mean Streak was new and huge and looked like the sort of thing of which roller coaster dreams are made. The ride shut down for a morning storm (that entire weekend was nearly a washout courtesy of Mother Nature) but following that brief inconvenience, treated my father and me to a ride that pushed us into our seats and truly felt like something from out of this world. It wouldn’t be until later that year when we visited Knoebels Amusement Resort (Elysburg, Pennsylvania) and discovered on riding Phoenix that bigger didn’t always mean better and that wood coasters were more enjoyable when levitating above the seats.
Indeed, it took me a few years to learn what separated the great roller coasters from merely good ones — after all, I had to ride a brilliant Bolliger & Mabillard looper like Kumba (Busch Gardens Tampa Bay, Florida) to realize Drachen Fire (Busch Gardens Williamsburg, Virginia) was fun only in the same way that being thrown down a rocky hill without a helmet was “fun.” However, many of those good (bad) rides nonetheless occupy places in my memories — attached to my father being there with me, just as he continues to be these days on Phoenix during Knoebels’ opening weekend and Phoenix Phall Phunfest. Because sometimes the enjoyment of a ride doesn’t come from the actual experience, but instead from who is seated next to you.
— Rob Ascough, ACE News Editor
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