Leaderboard

Erm. The third train wouldn't get to the brakes if there was a train there as it'd stop on the second lift. Used to be that the system might panic or due to having to do a standing start the train might not have made it to the right point in the brakes and would stop dead. Given the speed it enters that brake run I don't think any collision would be considered minor. They stopped running 3 trains long before Smiler happened (before it even opened in fact). The 20 second time frame to load the trains didn't really suit the park's then direction of guest interaction at the deficit of throughput (I am once again raging about your staff asking me to "flap my wings like a dragon" rather than dispatching the actual car). Vampire could probably do with another upgrade tbh. Especially with Vekoma being in a better place.

We went last week which allowed me to take my son on the ride, some 31 years after I first went on it. Last time I was at CWoA they were still doing a half-way decent job of running 3 trains (as good as the absolutely daft slow "park" procedure in the station would allow) so to see how absolutely appalling the operations are these days was quite shocking. I actually thought initially they were only running one train as the dispatch times were that slow. The queue that was there would have taken a max of 25min in the ride's heyday, instead of which it was posted at 120-150min all day... Even on 2 trains the original ride wouldn't have likely breached 45min with that many people in the queue. The station was ok - good to see the organist moving again, and the lighting package was a bit better... It just looks so bare though. The ride was running a bit better than I remember, though still "shuffling" a lot. It's just a bit sad to see the ride in what is effectively quite a neglected state when it is very obviously still all these years later one of the park's main attractions. I know they won't ever bring back the old trains but surely a bit of engineering work to improve the efficiency and making sure that the ride is staffed properly with a crew that are motivated would be worth doing?