A family coaster and the land around it, based on Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Track and scenery are one thing.
Ride + area concept design, layout, show set, scripting
Thomas Codling (banking, speed, block sections)
Gravity Sketch, VR Sketch, SketchUp, Rhino + Grasshopper, No Limits 2, Enscape
Fall 2025 · about two months · personal project
One big project, coaster plus show set plus land, with every step of the process out in the open.
After a real coaster job wrapped, I wanted one project I could show from start to finish. The coaster flies over the pathways and dives into indoor scenes; the land and the ride share the same scenery.
I picked Bartholomew and the Oobleck because it isn’t in Seuss Landing, it has clean rising action and a moral, and the Seuss style plays to what I’m good at: organic shapes, modelled in VR.
I invented an expansion pad off an existing park, built from real ones and scaled against them. It is not square on purpose, so it raises real problems: fire access, service roads, back of house, and no views out that break the show.
Three schemes; Scheme A won.
A family coaster, so I measured the ones that already work: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, Hagrid’s, Slinky Dog Dash, Hiccup’s Wing Gliders and the Barnstormer. Same scale, same site, side by side.
I worked in VR from day one: placing cars in the air, then drawing track under them. Dozens of options per section.
Whenever I got stuck I switched between the ride view and the ground view. That is how the land got its food, restrooms and stroller parking in the right places.
The part I’m proudest of. I wrote scripts to move track between VR, Rhino and No Limits 2, and back into SketchUp. The spiral lift hill was built in Grasshopper with full control of height along the path.
That meant I could design from the seat and hand Thomas real, testable track.
Nine to twelve station options before picking one: stacked, with separate load and unload and a dual move, like Mine Train. It sits at the back of the site so the maintenance bay is easy to reach.
Every piece of scenery near the track was checked against the rider’s reach envelope.
Coasters are bad at stories: a long train, everyone facing forward. So the lift hill carries the story and the drop is the joy. The winding lift is the spiral tower staircase from the book.
Scenes were timed around the corners, with an on-ride script.
The land celebrates Oobleck Day; the ride relives the disaster. Two timelines in one place. Green slime is everywhere on the ride and nowhere you can see from the ground. I placed every glob by checking sight lines from both.
“This is exactly what we do.”
A working coaster designer. He suggested a track switch after the station for cleaning.Restrooms too small, emergency roads too narrow, one arch too low.
An area developer’s notes. All fair.Show set columns too thin to clad the supports.
Another designer’s catch.Technical design with Thomas Codling, who pushed back well: he caught a mid-ride launch that, on a rollback, would have sent riders backward into a blind turn. A personal concept, not affiliated with Dr. Seuss Enterprises.