Swiss Toboggan at Little Amerrika

The Swiss Toboggan at Little Amerricka in Marshall, Wisconsin, is one of the strangest roller coasters you can ride in the United States. Instead of climbing a conventional lift hill, the tiny single-car vehicle is pulled straight upward inside a hollow steel tower by a vertical chain lift, rising about 45 feet before emerging at the top and beginning a long spiral descent around the outside of the same tower. The track wraps around the tower roughly six times before the car reaches the bottom, followed by a few small dips, turns and brakes that return it to the station. From the ground, the whole thing looks almost like watching a gumball fall through a giant metal dispenser. The Chance Rides Toboggan is about 450 feet long, has no inversions, and was designed as a compact portable roller coaster for traveling carnivals.

The ride’s history is almost as unusual as its design. Chance began producing the Toboggan in 1969 and built just 32 of the rides, originally intended to be transported on trailers from one carnival or amusement park to another. Little Amerricka’s machine is serial number 001 and began its life at Dogpatch USA in Arkansas as Earthquake McGoon’s Brain Rattler before later operating at Seven Peaks Water Park Duneland in Indiana. Little Amerricka acquired it and opened the Toboggan at the park in 1993, where it became Swiss Toboggan. It is now the last operating Chance Toboggan in the United States, preserving an unusual piece of traveling-carnival history that has almost completely disappeared.

Swiss Toboggan is especially fitting at Little Amerricka, a small, independently minded amusement park whose roots go back to owner Lee Merrick’s miniature railway hobby in 1987. The park officially opened in 1991 and grew around that railroad, vintage rides, miniature golf and a collection of attractions assembled from other parks and amusement operations. That fondness for unusual and historic rides is what makes Little Amerricka such an interesting destination for anyone who prefers weird, old-school amusement rides to polished corporate theme parks. For a genuinely unusual Wisconsin experience, the Swiss Toboggan is a standout: a 1960s-era roller coaster that looks unlike almost anything else still operating and can only be experienced here.