Thunderbolt

Kennywood's Thunderbolt began life in 1924 as Pippin, John A. Miller's fifth coaster design for the park, built by Kennywood's Charles J. Mach around a natural ravine. Pippin was known for a large double-dip into that ravine and for saving its biggest drop — 95 feet — for the very end of the ride, a reversal of the typical big-first-drop layout.

In 1967, Kennywood Entertainment president Carl Henninger and park manager Carl Hughes took a considerable gamble: they tore out Pippin's loading platform, upper turn, and double-dip, handing the redesign to the park's own head of maintenance, Andy Vettel. Vettel lengthened the lift to 70 feet, extended the track to nearly 2,900 feet, and added a new station positioned so trains would drop 50 feet immediately after leaving the platform, all while preserving Pippin's original ravine drops and its three 1958 National Amusement Device Century Flyer trains.

The rebuilt ride reopened on April 14, 1968 under the name Thunderbolt, chosen through a park naming contest. Its unusual pacing — an immediate steep drop out of the station rather than a climbing lift hill — combined with the reused ravine sections to create one of the most jarring, well-regarded layouts of its era, and The New York Times named it the country's top roller coaster in 1974.

More than fifty years after its rebuild and a full century since its Pippin origins, Thunderbolt remains one of Kennywood's most celebrated and structurally unusual wooden coasters.