10 best roller coasters

1. Steel Dragon is a roller coaster at Nagashima Spa Land Amusement Park in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Built by Morgan Manufacturing, this gigacoaster opened, appropriately, in 2000 - "The Year of the Dragon" in the Far East. It debuted only months after Millennium Force and surpassed the Cedar Point coaster as the world's tallest complete-circuit coaster. It also set a record for longest track length - 8133 feet, 2 inches (2479 m), which it currently holds.


2. Top Thrill Dragster is a steel, hydraulically-launched roller coaster located at Cedar Point Amusement Park in Sandusky, Ohio. It was the first "Strata Coaster," loosely defined as a complete circuit coaster that is 400 to 499 feet tall. It was built by Intamin AG and debuted to the public on May 4th, 2003. It is one of only 2 stratacoasters in existence, the other being Kingda Ka (2005) at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey.


3. Thunder Dolphin is a steel roller coaster at the LaQua amusement park, which is part of Tokyo Dome City in Tokyo, Japan. At 262 feet (80 m) tall, Thunder Dolphin is currently the 5th tallest continuous circuit roller coaster in the world, behind only Kingda Ka, Top Thrill Dragster, Steel Dragon 2000 and Millennium Force.


4. Millennium Force is a steel roller coaster located at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, and was built by Intamin AG. The fourteenth roller coaster built at the park, its royal blue track stands 310 feet (95 m) tall at its highest point. The coaster overlooks Lake Erie. When it was built in 2000, it was briefly the tallest complete circuit roller coaster in the world. It is also the first roller coaster to utilize a cable lift system, rather than the traditional chain lift. The chain lift was too heavy considering that Magnum's chain was 7 tons and two-thirds as tall. The cable lift uses a 800-horsepower motor that turns a set of sprocket gears that pulls the cable Cable lifts were previously only used on smaller coasters in Europe.


5. Dodonpa is a roller coaster at Fuji-Q Highland, Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi, Japan. It opened in 2001 and is a steel sit-down roller coaster with a compressed air launch. The ride was built by S&S Power of Utah, U.S.A.
It is 52 metres (170 feet) tall, and has a launch speed of 172 km/h (107 mph), which is reached in less than 2 seconds. When it was opened it was the fastest roller coaster in the world. As of 2006 it is the 3rd fastest but still has the highest acceleration at launch time.


6. Goliath is a steel roller coaster made by Giovanola of Switzerland. The hypercoaster is located in the Colossus County Fair area of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California.During a brief period from its opening on February 11th to May 13th, 2000, Goliath's 255-foot opening drop was the longest and fastest (85 mph) on a closed-circuit roller coaster in the world. Millennium Force at Cedar Point eclipsed Goliath when it opened on May 13, 2000 with a drop of 300 feet and speeds of 93 mph.


7. Titan is a hyper coaster located at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, Texas.Titan's supports used 2.8 million pounds of steel to manufacture. When it was built, the Titan was the longest roller coaster ever to be built at a Six Flags Inc. park.The impressive layout includes a negative G camelback turn and a double helix turn that produces 6 full seconds of sickening G force of up to 4.5 G. The Titan has a massive drop, 255ft at the tallest section, and reaches speeds of 85mph during a 5,280ft long ride lasting for 3 and a half rather thrilling minutes.


8. Kingda Ka is a roller coaster located at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey, USA. At its opening on May 21, 2005, it became the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world, claiming the title from Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. The train is launched by a hydraulic launch mechanism to 128 miles per hour (206 km/h) in 3.5 seconds. At the end of the launch track, the train climbs the main top hat tower reaching a height of 456 feet (139.5 m). Due to aviation safety concerns, the tower is equipped with three dual strobes: two mid-way up, and one on the top.


9. Nemesis is an inverted roller coaster located at Alton Towers, England. The ride was designed by Bolliger & Mabillard and opened in 1994 in the Forbidden Valley area of the park. It is themed around an entirely fictional legend created by The Tussauds Group (the park owners at the time) in which a monster, disturbed during routine maintenance work, creates a large crater in the Staffordshire landscape, and is necessarily restrained using the hundreds of tonnes of steel that make up the roller coaster tracks. The subterranean aspect of the theme was born of the necessity to build the ride in trenches to reduce its height above the ground, in compliance with local planning restrictions which require Alton Towers to build below the tree line.


10. Dragon Khan is a steel sit-down roller coaster located in the PortAventura theme park in Salou, Catalonia, Spain. Dragon Khan boasts eight inversions; this was a world record when the coaster was built. This record was broken in 2002 with the opening of Colossus in Thorpe Park, United Kingdom, which has ten inversions.