The Longest Roller Coaster

Roller coasters usually end just as your stomach drops, but the Steel Dragon 2000 was built to keep you screaming. Opened in the Year of the Dragon, this beast gives riders a thrilling four-minute journey packed with huge 300-foot drops and speeds over 95 miles per hour!

Because Japan experiences frequent earthquakes, engineers had to use massive amounts of extra steel to make the $52 million structure incredibly strong. The track is so long that the chain pulling the cars up the first hill has to be split into two separate systems!

How Is That Even Possible?

Roller coaster cars don't have engines! They run entirely on physics. The ride uses a massive 97-meter lift hill at the very beginning to store huge amounts of potential energy. As the train plummets, that turns into kinetic energy, providing enough speed to coast through the entire 2.4-kilometer track.