Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (Complete Ride Audio)
Hold on to your hats and glasses, because Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is the wildest ride in the wilderness — and the complete ride audio in this post proves it never needed a driver to get there. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad opened at the Magic Kingdom on November 15, 1980, completing the park’s trio of mountains, and it remains the purest roller coaster Walt Disney World ever built: no drops for the record books, no inversions, just a runaway mine train, a flooded ghost town, and three and a half minutes of beautifully engineered chaos. This recording carries the whole trip, queue music and all.
Photo: AmaryllisGardener, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The Mountain the Western River Expedition Left Behind
This ride exists because a bigger one died. When the Magic Kingdom opened in 1971, its western land was reserved for the Western River Expedition, a vast boat ride that was postponed again and again. Imagineer Tony Baxter, meanwhile, had an idea for a runaway mine train, and when it became clear the Expedition would never be built, Baxter’s coaster inherited the land — and some of its ambition. The Magic Kingdom version was actually the design’s original home: Disneyland’s smaller edition opened first, in 1979, because that park needed a new thrill ride sooner, but the Florida mountain was drawn bigger from the start.
Baxter modeled the rockwork on the spires and buttes of Monument Valley, and at 197 feet the tallest spire made Big Thunder the tallest “mountain” in Florida, a title it kept for decades. The whole project cost about $17 million, and Baxter used some of the earliest computer-aided design work at Imagineering to thread 2,780 feet of track through the rockwork he had sculpted as a physical model first. The detail is dense enough that Disney wrote the place a full backstory: in the gold-rush 1850s, the Big Thunder Mining Company struck it rich, ignored the local warnings that the mountain was cursed, and left behind the company town of Tumbleweed when the gold — and then the floods — ran their course.
Riding Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
The queue sets the story before a single car moves: the offices of the Big Thunder Mining Company, the ledgers and telegraph equipment of a going concern, and a wall of portraits that includes company president Barnabas T. Bullion — whose face happens to belong to Tony Baxter. Then come the trains, each with its own valiantly optimistic name: U.B. Bold, U.R. Daring, U.R. Courageous, I.M. Brave, I.B. Hearty, and I.M. Fearless. There is, pointedly, no engineer. The trains of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad simply leave, which the ride treats as entirely normal.
Photo: Bobby Bokista, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The ride itself climbs three separate lift hills, which is the secret of its pacing — every climb buys another burst of speed, up to about 35 miles per hour, and another set of scenes. Riders dive through a bat cave, past steaming sulfur pools and the rainbow-colored geysers of the boneyard, where a dinosaur’s ribcage sticks out of the rock, and then through Tumbleweed itself: a town permanently underwater, where the remaining residents have adapted — look for the fellow taking his bath in a floating tub and the Dry Goods store run by proprietors D. Hydrate and U. Wither. The whole ride lasts about three minutes and twenty-five seconds, and it ends the way it should, with the train rocketing home past the boneyard and back into the station, brakes squealing.
For more Frontierland water-adjacent mayhem, the ride’s old next-door neighbor lives on in our Splash Mountain area music post, and the attraction that shared Big Thunder’s origin story — the one that took the Western River Expedition’s land debate in the opposite direction — is over in Adventureland: Pirates of the Caribbean. More than forty years on, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad still runs its trains driverless, still floods its town nightly, and still earns the sign at the station. It really is the wildest ride in the wilderness.