Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (Complete Ride Audio)

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 1980 – Present

“This here’s the wildest ride in the wilderness!” Big Thunder Mountain Railroad opened in Frontierland on November 15, 1980 — a year after its Disneyland original — and it has been the Magic Kingdom’s runaway mine train ever since. This recording is the complete experience, queue music included.

The story is told on the way in. Big Thunder Mountain was rich in gold, and the Big Thunder Mining Company dug deep to get it — straight into ground the local legends said was cursed. The town of Tumbleweed boomed, then flooded; the miners vanished; and the mine trains began running the mountain on their own, with no crews at all. In the queue, in the mining company’s own offices, the Prospector delivers the famous safety spiel — hold on to your hats and glasses — and then you board one of those driverless trains yourself.

Big Thunder’s soundscape is unlike any other ride in this archive, because there’s almost no score to speak of. What you hear instead is the mountain: the slow creak and clank of the lift hills, wheels hammering over the joints in the track, wind in the tunnels, rushing water, dynamite in the earthquake cavern, and the creak of a town that never quite dries out. It’s a piece of pure ride atmosphere — three and a half minutes of machinery, weather and momentum, wrapped around a 197-foot butte built to evoke Monument Valley.

The mountain range of Frontierland has company in the archive: Splash Mountain, which rose beside Big Thunder in 1992 and ran until 2023, and Pirates of the Caribbean just around the corner in Adventureland.