The Roller Coaster Almanac started as a project to collect the birthdates of a few coaster designers. With the assistance of the many readers of rec.roller-coaster and with email collected from the people who have found the Almanac on the Web, it has grown to become an enormous collection of "on this day in amusement park history."
Back when the 'Web was young, the Roller Coaster Almanac was picked up by the first of many fine roller coaster web sites, Jim Serio's World of Coasters. The Almanac could be found there for many years, until the World of Coasters ceased operation in early 2001. As such, it seemed rather silly to duplicate that effort here when I built my own web page. Of course, this was back when we had to write web pages by hand instead of letting fancy database engines do all the hard work. When the World of Coasters went away, Bob Coker picked up much of the content, including the Roller Coaster Almanac, and incorporated it into ThrillRide. Then ThrillRide ceased operations.
Now I am pleased to announce that the Roller Coaster Almanac is again available through leading roller coaster web sites! With a little bit of coding, Jeff Putz has made the Roller Coaster Almanac available as the Roller Coaster Rollback at CoasterBuzz.
Even better, you can now have today's roller coaster history for your own web page, courtesy of CoasterBuzz, as seen here:
Finally, you can select this link to download a formatted text version of the complete Almanac. It's a 103k text file, and for best viewing, use a monospaced font on an 80-character line. This is the version which is periodically reposted to rec.roller-coaster.
Finally, if you have roller coaster or amusement park related history items you'd like to see included in the Almanac, please email them to me. I try to do updates about once a month. Please note that to be included in the Almanac the event must be associated with a specific date; "July, 1931," for example, is not specific enough, nor is "August 23."