Update September 2025: It appears Canada’s Marineland is selling most of its rides. Bill Ossim of Rides Plus, LLC is handling the sale with details like pricing managed through a formal inquiry process for qualified buyers. There have been some reports of pricing online with family rides going for $75,000 and thrill rides as high as $2.5 million.
It’s common for older parks to have to remove rides to make space for new ones, especially if the park is tapped out on expansion space. Often a removal is because the ride has reached the end of its mechanical life or maintenance costs have become prohibitive, but sometimes a ride just becomes less popular and needs to to go to make room for something better. Rides can be demolished and sold for scrap or cannibalized for spare parts to be used at other parks still operating similar equipment, but often they’re sold and can have a completely new life somewhere else. When this happens they might end up on a site like UsedRides.com or Amusement-Rides.com.
Scanning these sites is a lot of fun and sometimes you see stuff you may recognize, but often it’s more things you’d find at small local parks or traveling carnivals. However, a new listing from May 2024 on UsedRides.com caught my eye with the opportunity to own a roller coaster for just $15,000! It’s a steel family coaster called the Little Dipper, but it’s a legit roller coaster that could probably fit just about anywhere.
Amusement-Rides.com has some bigger stuff on it. Probably the most recognizable coaster for sale is the Speed the Ride which is a 224 foot LIM shuttle loop coaster by Premier Rides formerly located at the Sahara hotel on the Las Vegas strip! There’s also a Vekoma SLC under reservation, a Schwarzkopf, a Zamperla flying coaster and even an Intamin on there. No prices are mentioned, just “Contact Us”, but you’d imagine these would be more in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or even low millions to purchase.
I grew up on a park that made great use of the used market in the publicly owned Bay Beach Amusement Park in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I don’t think this park ever got anything new, but instead almost everything is used and refurbished. Being that the park is public, you transparently see some of these transactions like what is being paid for the ride and the associated refurbishment and install cost. Signs by the ride will even mention where a ride came from such as the former Bay Beast coming from Martin’s Fantasy Island in New York in 2015. Probably the most famous of these relocations was the roller coaster Zippin Pippin which came from LibertyLand in Memphis (Elvis’s favorite ride). This year’s “new: ride was a used Zamperla NebulaZ.
If you follow the local news you can get great nuggets about the behind the scenes workings of this market. This includes not only ride purchase prices, but also how an old ride can be sold for parts when it becomes more expensive to repair than replace.
“Ditscheit says the Sea Dragon’s manufacturer recommended shutting the ride down due to rusting that would cost $300,000 to fix. Replacement parts are also scarce due to the ride’s age.”
“The city plans to donate the Sea Dragon to the fundraising group, Friends of Bay Beach, with hopes any sales of parts will eventually be donated back into the park.”
“NebulaZ is a used ride the city purchased for $775,000 using federal ARPA money.”
https://fox11online.com/news/local/green-bay/two-more-rides-being-removed-from-bay-beach-amusement-park
So anyone wanna go halfsies on Little Dipper? Maybe for my backyard? Just kidding, I’d imagine neighbors and local authorities may have something to say about that 🙂 However, as a person who doesn’t like to see waste or see perfectly good rides that no longer fit their current park unnecessarily destroyed I’m happy there’s a vibrant market for used rides. Sometimes a ride is built custom just for the terrain of a park or has too much infrastructure and there’s no economic advantage to moving it or is too iconic or IP driven to move. However, most of the time a new paint job, name, theming and trains and it’s basically a brand new ride. Six Flags years ago had a ride rotation program where when a ride wore out it’s welcome at one park it would be moved to another park for its “new” for the following year. This lead to some issues at times with coasters becoming rough from repeated disassembly, but I think the program was a good thing. Hopefully more rides can find second lives elsewhere through sites like these so that new rides can be built while still allowing old rides to be enjoyed by others elsewhere.
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