Leaderboard

The Family/thrill issue always confuses me, Thorpe always gets more visitors each year over chessington. The rollercoaster/thrill model clearly works, I agree the park needs more family attractions to cater to both. I just can’t see the next rollercoaster after 10 years to be a family centred coaster. However, that’s a thorpe created issue. No sense of direction with who they are catering to and the lack of investment over the past 10 years. Means that their next investment has to be catered for kids or keep focusing on purely thrill based. Neither helps the park, unless they do both.

Maybe reading too much in to it, but one thing to note is the leaflet mentions “The new ride will provide an exhilarating…” blah. Maybe meaning this is likely to be a single coaster rather than a “land” similar to Chessington’s? I can’t imagine Heathrow would be an issue, would it? Any aircraft flying over a built up area at 500ft is asking for trouble, regardless of coasters, especially the traffic to/from Heathrow. If any aircraft to/from Heathrow is at 500ft (but not on short finals or immediately after takeoff) the top of a coaster is the least of their worries. I hope the local residents are onboard with Thorpe’s application. It’s all getting very exciting! (And a little weird - getting new coasters hasn’t been Thorpe’s thing for years!)

Could be from a very crude numbers point of view I guess: "We spend £x on a roller coaster and get back £y. We spend £(x/10) on something else and get back more than £(y/10). So 10 something elses gives more than one coaster, so why get a coaster when we can get 10 something elses?" I assume it wasn't quite that simple, but you get the gist. It wouldn't surprise me if that was the loose logic tbh In other news, here's TPM's news update nicely summarising everything: https://thorpeparkmania.co.uk/news/28-11-2021/Consultations+to+Occur+for+a+New+Roller+Coaster!

I don’t know about you guys, but I honestly reckon we could learn a fair amount about Thorpe’s coaster from this consultation. For instance, I’d expect that we’ll at very least discover a broad description of the ride that limits the scope of our guesses down to a much greater degree than it was previously; to use Chessington’s initial consultation in May as an example (given both are Merlin properties, I’d imagine that Merlin would want to keep procedures fairly consistent), the initial consultation they did revealed most of the key info. For instance: It was revealed then that it would be a “family thrill” shuttle coaster with a potential inversion and a 1.4m height restriction. The basic ride layout was also confirmed, as well as a rough idea of scale. The big theming structure and the land with the 2 additional filler rides was also confirmed at the initial consultation. I even remember the winged seating being thrown around by people who’d been to the consultation back then, although I’m unsure if winged seating was expressly confirmed at the initial consultation. The only things the full planning application for Project Amazon a few months later really confirmed that we didn’t already know were the finer statistics (e.g. exact height, track length), the finer details of the land, and that B&M was officially confirmed as the manufacturer (although B&M had been thrown around as a very strong rumour ever since the initial consultation). So from this consultation, I’d imagine we should expect: A broad description of what the ride is and what it does. A manufacturer may or may not be confirmed, but I’d imagine we may be able to take a fair stab based on what the park says about the ride. In terms of what I mean here; if the ride were a hyper coaster, for instance, the park would probably say that they were building a tall out and back coaster with lots of large airtime hills. A basic overview of the layout. Even though they probably won’t delve too much into specifics, they’ll probably show the footprint the ride will take up, the basic layout and the essence of what it does, the rough scale they expect (we expect the ride to be around [x]ft tall with [x] high points). With the site being picked, I’d also imagine that Thorpe may specify what’s being removed in terms of rides, infrastructure, trees etc. We may also get some hint at the theme, such as any theming structures being included. Chessington’s consultation revealed the basic jungle style theme, as well as the big theming structure. Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, but I’d personally say there’s a fair chance that we’ll get these sorts of things (or at least, something similar) revealed on the 10th based on what Chessington’s consultation for Project Amazon was like. Isn’t all this very exciting, though? I’m certainly optimistic that this could be something to really look forward to!

Any chance of you being that annoying friend who asks for a photo of the reverse of the leaflet too?

https://www.thorpepark-consultation.com/ 👀