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Plenty of talented creative people at Merlin who are often hamstrung by decisions made by money men, let’s not forget that John Burton was the lead on TWD (Poor guy) Best to wait and see if Ghost Train is any good instead of passing judgement based on who is and isn’t working on it.

Rode this yesterday. It's a good Ghost Train ride. Not the best one I've done, but it does have a nice story which you can sort of follow (which is less common in my experiences with these rides). Without posting anything too spoilery, but also giving mild spoilers, I particularly liked the mirror scene and the final scare (the physical prop is well hidden). At the same time, there's 3 scenes which are effectively just pitch black, and they don't quite work. One almost does, because it's a "hide and seek" style scene, but it needs something a bit more (lighting effects with eyes or something). The other two pitch black scenes need something. Now here's something which seems to be controversial. I preferred Duel. I significantly preferred Duel. Part of this is because I'm a sucker for interactive / shooting dark rides, and Duel was just a ton of fun for me as a result. The other part of it is that Duel never felt like an attraction which took itself too seriously. It had the spooky / scary theme, but seemed to have a bit humour / light-heartedness sprinkled in a a result. Alton Manor takes itself a bit more seriously, and goes the full nine yards on the creepiness scale, but doesn't have any sort of humour or 'fun-ness' to it. Now this is very much just a me thing. Is Alton Manor 'better'? Yeah, probably. It's got some cool effects and a nice story and a good creepy vibe. It's definitely on the higher end of ghost train rides I've done. But given a choice, I would rather ride Duel any day.

Don't get me wrong, many of the projects John Burton has worked on have been great. But it's silly to have any kind of thought process that: 'John Burton = good Not John Burton = not good' Ghost Train and Alton Manor are only loosely comparably anyway, so even if he was involved, it wouldn't necessarily mean we should expect the same standard.

Good to know they are getting somewhere with ghost train, hopefully it is finished soon. The only worry I have is that they don't seem to have been working on it for very long, making me think that not much would have changed and the attraction won't be amazing. But then I suppose towers turned duel around in a short space of time and from what everyone has been saying about that I suppose something great can be done in such a short time period.