Quaker Connections

Riding the rails - Freshman Graham Behringer is roller coaster enthusiast


It’s completely dark. The forest tree line is barely visible. The Beast launches forward and makes a sharp turn. In the blink of an eye, freshman Graham Behringer is being forced against the restraints of The Beast. The tunnels seem endless and the turns feel forceful. Before he knows it, Behringer is free-falling down the mid-ride drop. The Beast is relentless.

This is the experience of the third longest roller coaster in the world, The Beast, located at Kings Island in Mason, Ohio. Behringer claims that The Beast is his all-time favorite roller coaster that he has ever ridden. This is significant, considering the amount of coasters that Behringer has been a passenger on. “I have ridden about 130 roller coasters,” he said. “My brother, Miles, and I have. I can’t even think about how many parks we have been to. The parks that they have been to range from State Fairs, to smaller theme parks, to some of the biggest amusement parks in the country.

What sparked Behringer’s interest in roller coasters? Kingda Ka. The tallest coaster in the world, located in Jackson, New Jersey, coming in at a towering 456 feet, inspired Behringer and his brother to look deeper into the coaster community. “When I was about five, I found a video of Kingda Ka. I really wanted to go on it. So I showed my brother, and he got into it too,” explained Behringer. He and his brother then did some digging and found a database with every single roller coaster in the world on it. Their mission was to ride as many as possible -- and their roller coaster journey started as soon as they met the required height.

\tThrough this process, Behringer has become very familiar with the nitty-gritty of roller coaster details. He has been learning about all of the technical aspects of roller coasters:  all of the elements including visual, inverting and non-inverting elements. After riding a large number of extremely forceful coasters, Behringer has developed his favorite qualities of that type of ride. “One thing I really like about roller coasters is airtime. Airtime makes you feel weightless,” explained Behringer. “Inversions can be really fun, especially if they are forceful. So think of a loop. But once you get into the more obscure inversions, like a banana roll, you’re in your seat the entire time, and it’s pretty intense. It’s really fun.” 

Learning all about the technical aspects of roller coasters may lead a person down an engineering career path, but not Behringer, as he already has other plans. Though he is very invested into the technical and engineering features of roller coasters, he keeps it strictly as a hobby, and is thinking about other things in terms of his future. “It’s a fun thing to do, however I’m more into video games and things like that. I’m learning to code right now,” said Behringer. Being a video game coder is his dream job. 

Coding is a goal for Behringer, but he hopes to always keep his roller coaster hobby alive. Behringer and his sophomore brother, Miles Behringer, like to keep the journey interesting by creating a methodical ranking system. “I ride them mostly for fun. Sometimes we like finding parks that are extremely fun and we’ll rank them,” he explained. “Stuff we don’t find fun, we will rank lower, and stuff we find extremely fun -- with cool elements -- will be ranked pretty high up.” The system that they have created will continue to take this pair of brothers to different theme and amusement parks around the country for years to come.

Story by Liza Petersson