We’re living in crazy times at the moment. This year the parks have hardly been able to open for visitors and we haven’t been able to get to our favourite parks this season (so far). It’s been really hard, especially since the weather has been so glorious, but lockdown is very necessary and won’t last forever! While we’re waiting for the parks to open again, we thought now would be a good time to reminisce and appreciate the new rides that opened last year.

There were plenty of fantastic additions to parks all across the world in 2019, but we’re going to try and narrow it to the top 5 best roller coasters new for 2019. Of course, this isn’t based on fact, it’s just a collection of our own opinions and thoughts. But saying that, we’ve tried to include rides that made the most impact or were unique in some way.

Without further ado here’s our top 5 in no particular order…

Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure

As one of the world’s most expensive rides out there, Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure was huge addition for Universal Orlando. We haven’t had the chance to ride it yet, but from what we’ve heard it has awesome trains and a really detailed storyline. Intamin managed to build a ride with a stupid amount of launches (seven in total!), a roll back element and so much more. We’re really glad someone finally produced an outdoor roller coaster with an exciting storyline that’s told in detail throughout the ride. It’s worth a visit to Islands of Adventure just for this ride! It was a great 2019 addition for the park and it a much better fit for the Harry Potter area than Dragon Challenge.

Steel Curtain

This is a ride you might not have expected to see on this list. Steel Curtain at Kennywood features nine inversions, that’s the most inversions in all of America. It’s exciting that after all this time there’s now a heavily inverting ride in the States because they can be really great! But besides the inversions, the coaster is also huge - really huge. It seems like a big step up for S&S who previously hadn’t really had much going on in that region of the world. Who knows what we’ll see next from them based on the scale of Steel Curtain!

Dueling Dragons

Dueling Dragons at Guangzhou Sunac Land in China looks absolutely mental. It’s a duelling roller coaster with one side as a sit down coaster, and the other as an inverted coaster - crazy right? You start off with a triple launch with the tracks above and below each other. It must be quite a spectacle to watch the trains navigate the first loop element! After that they weave in and out of each other, then pass through lots of really interesting elements and inversions. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that Intamin are behind this crazy ride. The whole concept is very cool and we’d love to see more parks put in rides like this in the future.

Zadra

Quite a few new RMCs opened in 2019, but I’ve just chosen one to include in this list: Zadra. It’s a coaster with a different focus to other RMCs - there’s less airtime and it appears to be more about speed. The ride features low to the ground whippy sections which aren’t really seen on any other RMCs. In addition, it’s the first Ibox track hybrid roller coaster to be built completely from the ground up. It looks really awesome and is a great addition to the lineup at Energylandia, Poland’s premier theme park. We hope RMC keep experimenting with new styles and continue trying to diversify hybrid coaster layouts.

Taiga

Finally, from an actual RMC to an RMC-inspired coaster - Taiga - the Intamin multi-launch coaster at Linnanmäki in Finland. How awesome does this ride look? It starts off with a launch into a super twisted element and then dives down, really using the terrain. Just as it starts to slow it’s into the second launch, then it completes a huge top hat and the RMC inspired Zero-g stall. The setting is just fantastic, the pacing is great and it looks like a really solid roller coaster from Intamin (even if it is a little RMC inspired in places - that’s certainly not a bad thing!).

Honourable mentions

Of course, it would be rude of us not to hand out a few honourable mentions to some other great 2019 additions. Copperhead Strike at Carowinds in the USA also looks awesome. MACK really hit it out the park with another solid thrilling and enjoyable coaster for the whole family. Untamed at Walibi Holland in the Netherlands and Hakugei at Nagashima Spaland in Japan look like awesome RMC coasters. They are both solid additions to their parks and are definitely upgrades compared with the coasters they used to be. Yukon Striker at Canada’s Wonderland also looks like a great ride - a one-up of the dive coaster concept and the scale of it is immense. We’d love to give them all a try!

It’s a difficult time at the moment and it’s easy to get down about all the new for 2020 rides we’ve not had the chance to ride yet. So instead we should rejoice in the fact that we had so many fantastic new additions last year - it really was a great year for new coasters!

Let us know which new for 2019 rides you loved riding last season and which you’d like to get on in the future!

- Harry & Zoe

Top 5 New for 2019 Roller Coasters