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See they're doing lift hill walks for Hyperia. For £120. And you need to have done a track walk on Colossus, Oblivion or Swarm within 3 years. Seems a bit off to enforce that.

This is dragging a bit now isn’t it! Hopefully there will be an announcement one way or another soon. Temporary heras fencing has been put up along some of the perimeter of the site now - surely that is a good sign isn’t it. If a decision is made soon, I wonder how long realistically it will be before any meaningful work begins? I would imagine there would need to be some lead time - it’s not like there are loads of construction companies out there each with a big cupboard full of people stood there ready to start building the project - it wouldn’t surprise me if some companies have already been approached with some provisional timescales and requirements. I’m surprised we haven’t heard some news through leaks etc by now! (Which is a good thing of course but the point still stands!)

12 years ago today, the Swarm photo shoot meet. Good times.

There is certainly a potential for it running too fast if you do add weight to the trains. There will be all sorts of assumptions in the design and safety factors. It depends how conservative they were during design to determine how much weight they could safely add. I think the most realistic solution is to ensure that trains have x amount of guests when dispatching and to provide an easy evacuation plan for when it does inevitably stall with passengers.

I wonder if adding weight to the trains would then make them run too fast with the heavier trains + fully loaded with people. Fingers crossed this is less of an issue as it warms up a bit but I’d imagine Merlin / Mack would like a permanent solution to this.

The easiest engineering solution is to add some permanent weights evenly across the trains. Although that would require design checks to see if the structure and trains can deal with the increased forces. It would also increase wear. In the meantime the absolute easiest way to ensure weight is on the trains and spread out without going over the design maximum is fill the train with people. Installing LSMs would be very expensive, mostly getting the power over there and you would basically require new trains. It wouldn't surprise me if adding LSMs comes to a similar cost of reprofiling the outerbank.

Why not go the whole hog, take the lift hill down increase the angle by a couple of degrees and add 5-8 ft to the top of it. Should do the trick 😉 All seriousness though, a zero car with a ballast tank built in? Fill it during downtime then empty it before sending first riders around. Seems the cheapest solution.

Visited yesterday. Was fine overall since didn't set foot in X-Sector or Dark Forest (a recurring thing). Probably should've had some alarms when parking in what is usually the coach park rather than the disabled/express area, but there was a queue so directed elsewhere. Didn't bother with Toxicator as queue was consistently long. As per most of the thrill attractions on park. Wickerman batcher wasn't doing a great job as wasn't actually batching the main queue just RAP/Fastrack. Which meant baggage dump was a mess of people. Ended up waiting over 30 minutes in a fairly quiet Rollercoaster Restaurant for food. Think it went missing on system as food we did initially receive wasn't ours nor table next to ours. Who ordered after us but got food first. Burger was actually decent but seemingly toasted within an inch of its life? Skyride was testing and staff were training on Rapids at least. No Hex wasn't too problematic for us since not taking lil one on it. Spending most of our day in CBeebies Land really does mean we miss out on most of the problematic issues currently at the park. The sheer lack of support attractions is so telling though. No Blade meant faffing about doing nothing whilst others went on Nemesis, and also why we don't bother with 2 major areas of the park. It's daft and needs sorting not just from my selfish side but also to ease the pressure on the coasters in those areas. Justin's House is absolute chaos though.

I was actually thinking just the other day if Hyperia had a different post-breakdown ritual, becuase come to think of it I don't think I've ever (or if I have, it's probably literally only been one train) seen empty trains go round the track after a breakdown. The question of how Thorpe could fix the reliability issue is one that really interests me - LSMs where the trim brackets are is the most obvious answer to me, but I'm not sure how possible that would be to retrofit LSMs into a bracket not intended for LSMs and that's not even taking into consideration the fact that the trains probably aren't capable of utilising LSMs, which would mean yet ANOTHER retrofit which would likely cause a whole other stream of problems. Realistically, shortening the height of the outerbank inversion thing is probably easiest and would have the least amount of moving parts... but also can't really see the park opting for this either. I just reckon it will continue to be operated the way it is at the minute pretty much indefinitely - it's a pain in the arse, but at least it somewhat gets the job done without costing the park any extra money.

Oh dear, that’s not good to hear that about their finances. It puts some of this year’s closures in to perspective doesn’t it. I suppose they have no choice but to make cuts on spending, so they can go all in on the transformation phase they’ve mentioned. Gulp. BPB may not be my go-to park, but I really do hope that their plans pay off and things turn around. I recon this new Gyro Swing is a good move though. Drayton Manor’s smaller version is very good, and this larger model will certainly be imposing at pleasure beach. Good luck to them. It’s certainly not a great time to be running a leisure business in the UK is it

To be fair Thorpe do normally keep closed rides on the app unlike some of the other merlin parks, Stealth for example was kept on the app even though it was planned to be closed on the Sunday. Same for Hyperia during its issues last year. Yeah I noticed the change in post breakdown procedure on pass holder day. I wonder if this is for all breakdowns though or just certain issues? It is a quite disappointing to see the continuation of Hyperia opening late and hope that can be sorted. Really isn't a great customer experience having their new coaster opening over an hour late daily. I get that its more time consuming in the mornings with the dummys etc but they need a permanent solution or start testing earlier. Positive news, looking at queue-times it doesn't look like it had any shutdowns today so looks like they've sorted the issues causing all the stoppages.

Great news - never rode one of these but looks like a great flat. Nice to see PB making a big investment too. Do have to question from a business point of view making this announcement now. Will certainly put a lot of visits off till next year I imagine. Bit concerning last years losses rose to £2.8m too. https://riderater.co.uk/12451/blackpool-pleasure-beach-losses-rise-to-2-8m/

I imagine the announcement was made now to try to bury the sense of gloominess from the five ride closures this year 😅 I think this is a quality addition for PB; it will look striking from the promenade and within the park. Hopefully it's successful! The high capacity of 40 riders per cycle is also very welcome. I'm personally more fussed about River Caves, but at least we have confirmation of its reimagining now (and not permanent closure as I feared). If the park made alterations to their ticketing structure to make the most of their location I'm sure this new ride would be a hit, but we'll see.

Visited Towers this weekend for the first time this season. First impressions weren’t great, from the misleading car park layout, various delapited areas and the monorail running just two trains. Rather embarrassing to what could be argued to be the UK’s flagship park. Operations seemed noticeably inferior to previous standards, with Rita on just 1 train and Galactica on just 2 trains and 1 station, disappointing every 5 minutes. Having 3 rides closed ( albeit expected) is also a shame for a park that’s had 4.5 months to sort things out. On the p,us note, the Thirteen team were doing great! Although not rammed, queues often reached/exceeded 90 minutes. Spinball,oblivion, Wickerman, Galactica and Rita at the very least experienced lengthily shutdowns. This excludes the heavy rain closure that evening where most rides understandably closed for a short while. However closing Spinball in the rain (as opposed to reducing capacity) now is just disappointing. Despite running the Alton After Dark and being the start of season, there wasn’t any real buzz or atmosphere at the park which I’ve felt previously, even post Covid. The vibe improved noticeably after dusk, but there was just something missing and I can only put it down to further quality retraction from the Merlin machine. I had a Toby carvery breakfast, so therefore didn’t need to eat the overpriced and underwhelming food selection. I don’t want to be constantly negative about the resort, so I do have some positives. Toxicator is a great addition to the park, it looks the part more than I was expecting and looks great off ride. The setting was the right level of intensity and adds more to the area. Curse is still an exceptional dark ride and epitomises what the creatives can do with the right resources. Although a little rattly, Nemesis Reborn is still fantastic and looks stunning at night. I really want to be more appraising and positive towards the park, because they have so many great rides. But I can’t sugarcoat the place solely on this. Towers has a lots of operational issues at the moment and with current trends I see things getting worse rather than better. The park ideally needs millions spent on infrastructure upgrades, however this will probably never happen.

The simple answer will be only the park know. Previous opening days usually have queues peaking between 45-90minutes for major rides. But between the park opening late in March, having an Annual Pass day for the first time in many years, etc, it's harder to predict. Hyperia's reliability will also dictate the day I'd expect.

Just a quick question on how busy it's estimated to be on the 29th of March this year. Any replies would be much appreciated. Thank you!

To be fair, just deleted and reinstalled the app and Hyperia has now appeared. Great stuff at the moment...

I don’t think they are hiding anything to be fair, Hyperia shows on the app for me, it disappeared on the private buy out night last week for some reason but it was open then so not sure it was to try hide something on purpose!

So much for the “we’re unapologetically authentic and totally transparent” bit of the rebrand then 😂

Just a post about some Thorpe Park history some people may not know. In the early 2000's, the park installed its first fast track system, which was very similar to the ones used at Disney. You would put your park ticket in the machine and receive a printed fast track ticket. The system was free to use, and ran for about 1-2 seasons until they decided to follow Universal and charge for the service The machines were ripped out but you can still see remnants of the system today. Tidal Wave: The steel structure with the red roof covering the F&B kiosk was the original covering for the fast track machines Nemesis Inferno had an actual area for the machines included as part of the design. You can see this to the right of the queue line entrance, where the retail kiosk is now located. The ones for Colossus was located where the F&B unit at the bottom of the hill (near Samurai) is now located. Loggers Leap also had machines installed, and these were located next to the entrance to the queue line. Hope this was some fun bits of information from the parks history!

Learnt that trick off Towers.

Hyperia seems to be having a cracking start to the season after having 5 months off. Inexcusable really. Also, love the trick of not having Hyperia on the app so they can pretend it doesn't exist 😶‍🌫️

Not my type of ride at all, but then again, Blackpool isn't my type of park. Great addition to the park though, so all works.

Considering there are brackets for trims which would end up with the train going even slower through that element it does seem that something was massively miscalculated

Oh my god it's so obvious, I completely missed what linked those two compared to Hyperia. Dumb Mark. (I'll consul myself that Voltron valleyed in an area with no recovery launch and leave it at that).