How the Kingfisher was built over two rainy seasons

Building a launch coaster on soft ground is mostly about what you never see. Before a single piece of track arrived, our engineers drove 214 piles into the clay under Palm Ridge, some of them 18 metres deep, so the launch section would stay level through every rainy season.

The track was made in sections and assembled on site by a team of welders from Trans Amadi, most of whom had worked on oil and gas platforms before. They finished two weeks early, despite losing eleven days to rain in June.

Testing took four months. The first runs used water-filled dummies, which the team named after their aunties. Aunty Ngozi rode the Kingfisher 3,200 times before any person did.

The launch uses linear motors, which push the train with magnets rather than a cable. They draw a lot of power for three seconds, so they run from a bank of batteries charged by the solar field, not straight from the grid or the generators.

The Kingfisher opened in December and has given more than 400,000 rides since. Its record is still held by a 71-year-old grandmother from Rumuola, who rode it fourteen times in one day.