The Voyage is a wooden roller coaster located at Holiday World & Splashin' Safari in Santa Claus, Indiana. Designed and built by The Gravity Group with the help of designers Mike Graham, Korey Kiepert, Larry Bill, Chad Miller, and former park President Will Koch, the roller coaster is themed to the famous voyage of the Mayflower by Pilgrims to North America in 1620. It opened to the public on May 6, 2006. It is widely considered one of the best wooden roller coasters ever built, and was awarded by TIME Magazine as the Best Roller Coaster in the world in 2013.
Among wooden coasters, The Voyage ranks second in length and sixth in height, featuring a track length of and a maximum height of . Also, its 24.3 seconds of air-time is the most produced on a wooden coaster to date. Another unique statistic is the ride's five underground tunnels. In 2006, it won a Golden Ticket Award for "Best New Ride" from Amusement Today magazine, which also ranked The Voyage as the "Best Wooden Roller Coaster" from 2007 through 2011.
History
Development
On July 13, 2005, Holiday World announced plans to add a new Thanksgiving section for the park's 60th anniversary. A new wooden roller coaster called The Voyage was revealed as the main attraction for the new area. The Gravity Group (a company formed from the remnants of Custom Coasters International which went bankrupt in 2002) was contracted to build the new ride. Larry Bill, a co-founder, was heavily involved in the coaster's design. Park President Will Koch also participated and is listed as one of the ride's designers. As with the development of another coaster at the park, The Legend, Koch sought input from roller coaster enthusiasts around the world. During construction, The Voyage was featured in nationally televised episodes of "SuperCoasters" on the National Geographic Channel and "Building the Biggest: Coasters" on the Discovery Channel.
The Voyage opened to the public on May 6, 2006. It originally operated with three, 28-passenger trains manufactured by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company (PTC). The first twenty-eight seat reservations for the ceremonial first ride were auctioned off on eBay, with proceeds donated to Riley Children's Foundation in Indiana.
Modifications
In November 2009, Holiday World announced that they would be replacing their PTC trains with a new train model called a Timberliner. The new model was under development at the time by Gravitykraft, an affiliate company of The Gravity Group. The park's goal was to improve the ride experience, which had become somewhat rougher over the years as the track aged. Anticipating the arrival of two Timberliners, Holiday World sold two of its three PTC trains from Voyage to Darien Lake, another amusement park seeking replacement trains for one of its own – The Predator. However, The Voyage's new Timberliner trains arrived too late for the 2010 season, so the park decided to move one of the trains from The Raven over to Voyage. The transition required modifications to the train, and the move left The Raven with only one train for the remainder of the season.
For the 2011 season, Holiday World continued with the same train configuration on The Voyage. The original Timberliner model that was tested at Holiday World ended up on other coasters at other parks – Wooden Warrior at Quassy Amusement Park in Connecticut and Twister at Gröna Lund in Sweden. Gravitykraft was instead planning to debut a newer Timberliner model on The Voyage in 2012. The Raven needed to return to normal rider capacity in the meantime, so Holiday World purchased an additional five PTC cars. With their two spares, they were able to construct a full seven-car train to be used on The Voyage and allow the return of the borrowed train back to The Raven.
In 2012, a delivery delay of the new Timberliner model trains prevented the park from adequately testing them in the spring. Holiday World decided to postpone their implementation to the 2013 season. In addition to routine track maintenance, Holiday World worked with The Gravity Group in the 2011-12 off-season to rebuild and reprofile portions of the "spaghetti bowl" turnaround near mid-course. As a result of the reprofiled turn, an additional 0.1 second of air-time was created, raising the ride's new air-time total to 24.3 seconds.