Work is well under way on the exciting addition of a family roller coaster at GreenWood Forest Park.
The foundations have been completed and the construction of the superstructure has started, so everything is on schedule for the Green Dragon family coaster to be open for passengers on Saturday May 29 - the start of the Whitsun half-term holiday.
Green Dragon is the world's first people-powered roller coaster and it works by combining two old technologies.
The first is the traditional gravity coaster and the second is the inclined railway developed in mines and quarries for moving heavy slate/coal down steep slopes without any external energy source.
The latter works by having two parallel railtracks with two sets of empty cars connected by a cable going round a pulley at the top. The tracks are usually only a few metres apart at the most and the cars at the top are filled with stone and allowed to drop down the track under gravity. In doing so, they pull up the empty cars from the bottom. The full cars are then unloaded at the bottom and the empty ones filled at the top, and the process is then repeated.
GreenWood Forest Park managing director Stephen Bristow explains: "We are doing this with people. They walk up a hill, get into a carriage, roll down the rails and so pull up the empty coaster cars, which are on a transporter on the main track."
"At the bottom, the passengers get out, walk up the hill again and go on the ride. At the end of the ride the cars roll onto the transporter, the people get off and the process starts again."
The new Green Dragon family coaster is a ride not to be missed.