Leaderboard

I first rode Derren Brown's Ghost Train in 2017. I've made my feelings clear about the very muddled story in this thread before, but I ultimately did find it a flawed but generally enjoyable ride. Not worth a long queue or the money spent on it, but it was fine. Fast forward to Fright Nights 2019, and oh boy have my feelings changed. The queue for the ride was advertised as a 50 minute wait. Ok, that's fairly long but it was Fright Nights and everything was busy. 60 minutes later we were still not in the batching area. In the 30 minutes that followed, we saw only 3 batch groups enter. One every 10 minutes! Really?! I know this ride isn't great with capacity, but I cannot understand operations being this bad. The pre show was as boring and disconnected from the experience as usual, but at least it all worked. Once it ended we moved onto the next waiting area and waited. And waited. And waited. We were there for 5 minutes. Worsening the wait was that the room is lightly themed with no music (I thought IMA score made 90 mins of music, and yet it plays only in the queue, why?) and we were waiting with the worst actor / staff member they could find. This preemptively killed any momentum the pre show gave the experience. Despite the lengthy wait, when we did move into the hanging carriage room we were hurried through to board. This room is probably the only decent bit of the ride and yet we barely got to experience it. Genius move Thorpe. Genius. Once onboard we had VR segment one. It was fine, but very little happens really on reflection (it occurs to me that the whole VR segments contain 2 'ghosts' in total, which is ridiculously low). After the VR segment we were asked to wait on the train for a bit. At this point we all sat in the awkward and silent carriage. No music, nothing. People around us muttered "is that it?" and "that was s***". We eventually moved into the abysmal middle section. There were no sound effects or music. We all wandered around an empty set of cages and then (would you believe it) we reached the end and waited for ages. In silence....again. Eventually we went into the 2nd VR segment and saw the final of the two 'ghosts' of the experience. The segment was fine. Once over we went into the shop for the fake-out finally. We waited there for ages before anything (what a shocker). When it did begin we merely got a man in a t-shirt rather than a demon. Really?! This ride was ok at first but now it is utterly abysmal. There is NO sense of theatrics at all anymore. In 2017 there was a serious effort to keep the pace going and maintain some story. There was an energy from the actors and the middle section was seemingly the glue that held it all together. Now there were awkward silences, confusion and waiting it was an embarrassment and I struggle to see how anyone enjoys it in it's current state (if anyone does I'd love to know why). Judging from the people in my train the public seem to hate it.

I have a simpler solution. ...DEMOLITION.

It should not be possible for that part of the ride to operate while the main cable is inactive. If the main cable was inactive that would suggest suggests the ride had effectively been e-stopped, but not all parts of the ride had halted at the same time. All educated guesswork bit either way that this can happen at all suggests strongly a hardware/software failure, not human error.

I just wanted to praise the way Nemesis Inferno looks at night during Fright Nights this year. The mist was fully working at the weekend with a new orange light in the queueline, it looks incredible and the best I've seen it look after dark for years. The ride itself was running very well by the evening, by far and away the best coaster experience at Thorpe in my opinion.