It’s 2005 and her dad, a mechanical engineer, has convinced her to attend a lecture at the University of Reading. She’s only 14 but is already thinking about a career in engineering. She loves maths and physics. And this lecture is all about designing rollercoasters, her other great passion. Michelle feels like the youngest person in the room. The presenter is explaining how rollercoaster trains are configured and controlled.
Up on the screen, the lecturer shows the layout of a rollercoaster and asks if anyone knows the ride. Michelle looks around, sees no hands going up and slowly raises hers.
“It’s Rita,” she says, referring to an icon-of-a-rollercoaster at the Alton Towers theme park near Stoke-on-Trent. Those who ride Rita (the Queen of Speed) are shot down the track and hit 100km/h in two-and-a-half seconds.
It’s the right answer and the presenter is suitably impressed. Michelle feels a boost of pride, along with a sudden realisation.
“I can make this my career,” she thinks. “That’s pretty cool.”
Prize-winning innovation
These thoughts stay with Michelle as she finishes school and studies engineering. For a while, they recede as she lands a job with engineering firm WSP and finds new interests, like 18th-century arches hidden under London Bridge Station. She gets a taste of inspecting and designing structures and sets out to invent a new equation to measure the loadbearing strength of ancient masonry beams.
She does just that. Her research is not only published but wins an award (the Frederick Palmer Prize, handed out by the Institution of Civil Engineers).
Michelle is led into the realm of project management. Then, like the splash of a log flume, her childhood dreams of designing rollercoasters reappear. She stumbles across a job at Merlin Entertainments, which not only runs Alton Towers but Chessington World of Adventures and Thorpe Park. Before long, she’s guiding new ride ideas from concept to launch.
“The most exciting moment is when you put a rollercoaster trolley on the track and it does its first circuit,” says Michelle. “It’s the most extreme moment of the build.” But getting there can take years and teams of specialists. Each build begins with a creative concept (the story) and then runs through the design, build and extensive safety inspections. A single light holder placed incorrectly inside a tunnel can have catastrophic consequences.
Over four years at Chessington, Michelle worked on around a dozen builds. One still stands out: Tiger Rock. With its winding watery track and tiger-teeth tunnels, the ride runs through an enclosure where four live predators roam.
Michelle worked at Chessington and now runs her own consultancy (Credit: This Is Engineering)
A first for Europe, Tiger Rock mixes entertainment and conservation. Building it required months of working with vets and wildlife experts, the Swedish zoo where the animals were born, and the engineers responsible for the mechanics. The Amur tigers, the world’s largest tiger subspecies, were given bridges to walk over and space to explore (from a safe distance).
Michelle remembers the moment the big cats arrived. She and the others expected the tigers to explore their new surroundings slowly, but one bounded straight across a bridge and pounced onto a 4m-high feeding pole. Nothing could prepare her for such an incredible encounter. Another magical moment. “We’re doing something amazing here,” she thought.
Michelle has since joined a campaign called This is Engineering, an initiative to persuade more young people to become excited about engineering. Last year, she opened her own consultancy called Firefly Creations. With her partner, Michelle is designing attractions for the UK, Europe and the Middle East, with an eye on Asia and America.
Magical moments
Michelle’s also got a new dream: to disrupt the ride system itself and to combine thrill with digital-era storytelling (imagine rides that can read emotions and respond). She’s out to build the next-generation Rita – an unmissable ride that creates the perfect escape from reality. A ride that makes people want to put away their phones and experience their own magical moments.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.