Crash Mountain
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Features
Upon entering the ride, two guests will be placed into each cart in the train. With six carts, at any one time twelve passengers will be riding Crash Mountain. Upon entering each cart, passengers will be greeted to lush seats and arm rests, representative of the extravagance of the early twenties. After getting a quick introduction from Beckett Yates about the wonders of the 1920s, the ride will then begin. In this ride, the passengers will travel up to a height of 375 feet, or 114.3 meters, following the ebb and flow of the stock market from 1920 to 1929.
After a slow build, consistently getting steeper and steeper, for three minutes, the passengers, now filled with anticipation as their carts travel farther and farther from the ground, the passengers will have reached the summit. Starting off, the train will drop almost 130 feet, or 40 meters, before slowly recovering, creating a false sense of hope in the passengers before the next plunge of almost 100 feet, or 32 meters. After these two plunges, the key attraction of the ride occurs, and from 200 feet, or 61 meters, tall, the train will begin its third and final descent, travelling at an average velocity of 34.6 m/s back down to the ground the passengers left five minutes ago. Taking use of this fast drop, the ride then curves back towards the start, taking use of the momentum built from the drop to travel the 330 feet, or the 101 meters, of horizontal distance that the ride covers.
History
Based on the stock market crash of 1929, this ride will take you through what marks the start of the Great Depression. Over four days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 25%, losing $30 billion in market shares—equivalent to almost $400 billion in today's economy—which was more than the total cost of World War I. The massive miss-management of stocks that lead to the largest stock market crash in human history can be drawn back to different key issues. From the postwar economy, certain sectors recovered, and created mass profits. However, the agricultural sector never recovered due to the world wide drop in prices for grain and other farm products due to the availability of more European workers. Besides this, another cause would be involved with the United States obsession with a consumer culture.
With the never ending shopping spree of the 1920s, more and more expensive appliances and luxuries were purchased. The Model T became more and more common and by the time of the crash, refrigerators and radios appeared in over half of all homes. Nevertheless, just because there were more items to purchase does not mean that there were more rich people to purchase them. Many of the poor wanted to experience the luxuries too, and thanks to a new form of borrowing, they can! With the creation of new forms of consumer credit, rich or poor could go into debt through purchasing items that they can not afford and get auto loans that would inevitably lead to the great depression and the stock market crash of 1929. With this purchasing through borrowed monies and miss-management of stocks, a bubble was formed right up to the crash, and while the signs are here now, few saw it coming then.
Similar causes of the crash can be seen in the 2008 housing crash, which caused the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010. Like with the crash of 1929 access to cheap, easy credit allowed for irresponsible purchases, however here, it was the bank's purchasing irresponsible housing bonds, and the consumers having to deal with the outcome. Both events created large bubbles before the actual crash, and few worried beforehand, because the "banks were too big to fail".