What program(s) do roller coaster engineers use?

B&M and Intamin do use No Limits to do their animations I believe, but they don't use it to actually design the ride because you don't even need supports in No Limits for your coaster to work. They will use some CAD package (AutoCAD, ProE, NX, Solidworks, Catia, etc.) to design the track and trains. For design validation, they will use some sort of Finite Element program (Ansys, Cosmos, CalculiX, etc.) Pretty much all engineering disciplines use some sort of FEM (finite element method) to do design validation because it it cheaper and more time efficient than traditional testing. The safety factors for roller coaster loads are enormous though because dynamic loading from the trains causes fatigue loading on each portion of track, so they will also need fatigue modeling and analysis software. Because the roller coaster market is pretty small, there are only a handful of people who are actually roller coaster engineers (probably less than 200 people worldwide), so it is one of the hardest jobs to get. There is no roller coaster engineering degree. To be a roller coaster engineer, they would probably want civil engineers and mechanical engineers, and these are both huge fields so you would still be able to get a job with your degree doing something else if you couldn't get a job in the amusement park industry.

5 dollar... 5 dollar... 5dollar foot longs