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Forums have unfortunately died away a bit. The rise of social media is a big part of that. And then with Discords, Slacks, Twitches and whatever else (I feel like an old man talking about that as I have no clue on these things properly), it just adds. The idea of signing up for one specific website to discuss one specific topic is just foreign now. Thorpe-specific as well, it's no coincidence that here at TPM the forums dropped off during a time when investment in the park was at rock bottom. We went from coasters every 3 years, and new attractions yearly, to bouncy castles and mazes being the 'big new things'. And yeah, theme park enthusiasm has changed dramatically. 10 years ago, it focused a lot on "trying" to find out whatever you could, but deep down knowing you would just get the odd glimpse here and there. You might hear from / know someone who legitimately knows something, and you got a kick out of knowing it. But it was all a lot more 'wait and see'. Now, influencer culture more broadly means people have quite literally been able to turn their hobbies into a career of sorts. It's their job to find out the information, be that camping out for days on end, working alongside the parks or what have you. It feels a lot more stifled. This point really resonated with me @Inferno We're currently experiencing a double-edged sword of information. Getting 'behind the curtain' is so much easier now, be that through press nights, VIP BTSs, park open-ness, etc. But sometimes a bit of ignorance can be bliss too, or that more scattergun approach feels more natural. Seeing behind the curtain is very controlled, parks will naturally sweep the dirt under the rug before they do that (literally, in some cases). There was something much more exciting about just catching glimpses here and there in a more uncontrolled way. At the same time, just reading your Face it Alone review from Studio 13, it made me go "Damn, I wish we had a POV of it. I would love to remember how it looked during that middle third which is such a blur". Even if we know that a press night POV would be over-egged, it would still be good to see (okay, there wasn't a 'press night' in the way we're used to describing that for FN14, but you know what I mean). We're really in a golden age of being able to document and archive stuff, which I think is positive. Going back to a more TPM-focus now, I've literally spent more than half my life as a member on this forum. I've made life-long friendships here. At one point, I house-shared with a couple of people I met through TPM. Whilst that's stuff that could happen on Twitter / Discord / Whatever, it just felt much more natural here. I always feel like these days I could contribute more to the forums, but as Benin says, growing up means forums slowly subside in the priority list. With TPM, we keep the socials active. The forums and the website have suffered. The main website in particular; backend-wise, it's ancient, and those problems have crept into the look of the website (you can't actually read any news article at the moment, lol whoops). We're looking at fixing that over summer though... We intend to keep the forums running. We're probably long removed from the days of running meets. But we never ran paid-for meets/events (even when we got ERTs, BTSs, etc), and don't intend to go down that way. TPM is just a couple of people who like Thorpe and like sharing that enthusiasm with others, through both sharing updates and discussing things. Don't want to make it a career or anything. We've never gone down the Youtube/vlogging route, simply because we don't want to talk in front of a camera. We're not changing who we are, even if that means we're becoming a bit of relic to enthusiasm of yesteryear. Anyway, that was very tangential to this and rambling and hijacking of the topic at hand. The whole theme park enthusiasm has changed, some of it for the better, some for the worse. I guess the good thing is you can still make of it what you want. It's just a shame it's harder to keep it 'as it was', if you will, when the rest of it has changed around you.

@pluk has posted on TPM again?! We've missed you!!

I can give insight here. A few years ago (well, more than a few years now...8 years ago...I'm old), I had a job at Thorpe which was focusing primarily on 'looking after queue times', if you will. I had to update queue times that would appear on the boards, along with some other things. At the time when I joined, it was simply a glance and estimate. It was a two-way operation: the ride operator was required to contact the 'queue person' (ie: me) via phone once an hour (at a minimum), saying what they thought the queue time was. The queue person would also walk around the park, visually looking at all queues and updating the queue times. How is it physically done? All updates were done via a secure webpage. The queue person walked around with an iPad and could update directly all queue times from said webpage. Other people (park managers, etc) had access and ability to as well (will get onto this later). How would ride operators know what the queue time is? This was done by looking at the length of the queue, which for many rides, they could only see through via the ride's security cameras. The security cameras ride operators have access to focus primarily on ride areas (making sure no one is entering them), meaning coverage was mixed. Ride operators would sometimes not see much of the queue. Note: Queue lines are still covered by CCTV cameras, but ride operators won't have access to them all necessarily. The ride operator job is to run the ride safely. And that's a key point, the ride operator is there to run the ride safely, look after the ride hosts, etc. Updating queue times can go quite low on the list of priorities. Also, ride operators generally didn't have much knowledge of queue times. It would all be based on own experiences, either from when they might have visited the park and queued themselves, other operators, what guests say, etc. Generally they would get good ballpark figures, but when you hit busy periods, that experiential data is less helpful. How would the Queue Person know what the queue time is? Same idea. They would walk around, see the queue time, and update it. The advantage they had is they could see the whole queue, and have knowledge of what else is going on around the park. Eg: Colossus operator might not be aware that Saw closed down recently, meaning more people might flock there if they're nearby and want to ride a coaster. Queue Person would know this, and could keep a closer eye as a result. So it was all guesswork? Going onto my experience of working in this position as the queue man. I noted straight away there was very minimal written down information about how the physical length of a queue translates to a queue time. Of course, everyone was aware that this is a very muddled science: it depends on operations, number of trains, number of Fastrack / RAP users, delays, etc etc. Many of those things ride operators will not be aware of explicitly. Some of those things are out of a singular person's control. However, there is a way of turning it into a science. "Queueing theory" is a very rich area of maths, for example, which gives us many lessons we can learn. There's a lot of social science studies into how people will fill up a given space with strangers. There is access to lots of data about the rides; their uptime, their throughput/utilisation, so on and so on. You can combine all of those factors together to give a better estimate for queue times, one which relies on data, rather than just guesswork. Taking the Guessing out of the Guesswork I'll chuck in a bit of the numbers and theory here. Feel free to skip over. When thrown into a barriered queue, you'll find people spread out in similar ways. Except in extreme scenarios (very wide or very narrow queue lines), about 11 people will fill up 3m of space. This is to do with how groups of people will huddle together, groups will leave a space, etc. That data comes from a published research paper back in 2014/15 I believe and focused on UK audiences. Would be interesting to see if that's changed post-Covid, or is different in other countries. Anyways. If we know that, we can work out how many people a physical queue line holds. For example, if the Colossus queue line was 300m long, it would hold roughly 1100 people. And you can split that up; if the queue line from the airgates to the tunnel of Colossus' queue was 90m long, the number of people between the queue line and boarding is 330. (NB: Lengths made up). Now, we know what Colossus' theoretical throughput is. Internally, there is also a target throughput. But even better, parks track their throughputs for each ride. So you can see what they're actually achieving. If, over the course of last week, Colossus got a throughput of 550pph, and it had a full, 300m long queue line, you could see that it should be a 2 hour queue. Obviously that ignores Fastrack and RAP users. But again, you know the number of RAP and Fastrack users each day. You can take those into account, in some way. You don't know when they're going to use, but you can take it into account. For example, if there were 700 Colossus Fastrack tickets sold for an 8 hour park day, and 500 RAP users expected, you can account for that. If Colossus was getting a throughput of 550ph, over 8 hours it would get 4400 riders. But 1200/4400 of those riders came from Fastrack or RAP. So that means only 73% of riders are coming through the main queue, or rather the throughput of the main queue is 73% of 550, which is 400pph. Now if that 300m long queue of Colossus is filled with 1100 people, and you know 400pph are going through that queue, you can advertise the queue at 2h45min, rather than 4 hours. (Again, all numbers are fake here) On top of that, you can also take into account the chance of a shutdown. If Colossus has an uptime of 95%, then that means its closed 5% of the time. Of course, this is unlikely to spread evenly across the day, and usually occurs in a chunk, but if you add on that extra, you create a buffer which allows for a 'chance of shutdown', or just anything going wrong (slower operations, etc). I'll take this chance here to say: ride staff do not artificially inflate queue times to sell Fastrack tickets. I've no doubt it happens whereby a queue is advertised much longer than it is, and people have ended up buying Fastrack. But the queue time is not inflated to drive Fastrack sales. In saying that, I think it's better to advertise a queue time which might be 5-10 minutes longer since it will: 1) Create a buffer in case of issues and 2) Create happy guests - "Oh, the queue was advertised as 50 minutes, but we actually queued 40...result!" So, the way that I planned to calculate (note the word calculate, not estimate/guess) queue times would be: (N*(1+D))/(T*(1-(F/R))), where: N is number of people in queue D is percentage downtime T is throughput F is number of Fastrack and RAP users expected R is total ridership expected for the day Those 4 last variables would be based off numbers from how the ride has run over a period of several days / weeks prior, giving it a good outlook at how it should operate in practice. It wouldn't be perfect, but it does the job. And of course, number of people in a queue is again estimated, but can be done reasonably well. Of course, this isn't something that can be done in your head or anything, but can all be programmed to be done automatically, so long as you say the number of people in the queue roughly. When I trialled this system, it worked well, with overall accuracy of queue times improved, and less complaints about inaccurate queue times, which also saw a reduction in complaints about queue times altogether for a short period of time. (Those two might not be linked, but I'm gonna claim it's because of me). I'm a Celebrity was one which hugely benefitted, in part down to the huge buy in from the Entertainments Team running it. The issue here is, simply put, getting buy in from others. I required a bit more help setting up the automation and implementing it on a broader scale. Some people are opposed to change, some people are opposed to change where they don't understand every detail, some are just happy with the way things are. Some of Matt's analysis here is exactly the sort of thing which would be excellent for the operations teams at Merlin theme parks to see, so they can have more detailed data to help them determine how they're performing and the reflection on advertised queue times. But from my past experience within the parks, you would find yourself encountering people who: -Don't understand the analysis behind this, so immediately disregard it, -Would love the bottom line, but wouldn't use the data to help improve it, -Disregard everything and say everything is fine, -Agree with everything, but don't have the time/resources to action upon anything that would help. Obviously, with shifts in Merlin, this may be different now. But it's such a difficult thing to achieve. There are (naturally) some excellent data-driven minds who work in Merlin, who would love this stuff too, but they are used in other roles, usually outside of day-to-day operation / outside of attractions entirely. So Merlin know the importance of these things, it just hasn't trickled down to operational success. My time within the queue person job ended back in 2017, and this isn't the place to discuss that. But ultimately, the system devolved into operators phoning a central figure in an office to update queue times, with managers also chipping it. Likely with zero consistency. I don't know how things are this season admittedly, and I've been impressed with the accuracy being better than it has in the past. So maybe they've got something a bit better now. FAQ Do all parks do this guesswork? Within Merlin, I believe so yes. I think Towers have staff at rides update queue times, and Chessington was similar. Why did Thorpe need a central figure to update queue times? Couldn't it just be done by each ride through the website? The issue with the website and multiple users would be the constant need to refresh. If, say, there were 2 people on the website, and Person A updates Colossus' queue time from 10 minutes to 50 minutes, the site according to Person B would still have Colossus' queue time listed as 10 minutes, even though it was displaying on boards as 50. Then, if Person B updated Swarm's queue time from 30min to 20min, without refreshing the website, they would also update Colossus' queue time back to 10 minutes. So yeah, clunky system. I don't know if they've updated this. *This park* advertises queue times super accurately, how do they do it? I don't know. I would love to know how parks like Efteling, Europa, etc do it. Why can't parks just count the number of people going into a queue and going on a ride, using barriers, infrared, whatever? These work nicely in theory, but are open to abuse (people spinning barriers) and prone to error. The Alton Towers app had some Bluetooth tracking tech a while back, where it could see where guests were spending more of their time, etc. I don't know if they still do that, but I believe attractions.io (the company that does the Merlin apps and more) have loads of cool backend features. With Saw though, they had a very cool (rather complicated) piece of software they trialled. The name escapes me, but I'm sure I'll find it sooner or later. Basically though, it would track people in all queue lines, to see how long people were spending in the queues, and use it to give accurate queue times. It would update regularly, and give to the minute readings (eg, 47 minutes). This software was just installed to work with existing CCTV cameras. And, it worked well. Very well. Queue times were accurate. The system wasn't prone to error or breaking. It just worked, so you could leave it. In saying that, there were operational issues: -If you ever needed to over-ride it, you had to reset all the cameras to get the system back -It would never display a queue time lower than 10 minutes -It didn't work when the queue became external (ie out of the main queue) -People were weirded out by the exact numbers The middle two are the bigger issues here, but again, not huge in the grand scheme of things. There were bigger, more damning issues: -It was expensive. I don't know how much, but given every other queue time system is free pretty much, spending money on one is an issue. Spending lots of money is a bigger issue. -It required static CCTV cameras on the entire queue line. Whilst the entirety of Thorpe Park is covered by CCTV, many of these have the ability to change angle, which can help in a security situation. If you needed static CCTV cameras for the queue lines, it meant having to buy, set up, operate and maintain more new ones. And for some queue lines, this would require an awful lot (Colossus would be nightmare, with its sprawling queue line, going through tunnels, foliage, etc). Ultimately, whilst it gave accurate queue times, the initial outlay cost, and ongoing maintenance costs, weren't justifiable. Do accurate queue time really matter? Just to round off on this very long, tangential post (sorry Matt!). How important are accurate queue times? At the low level, yes, it's handy to know if a queue is 5 minutes or 10-15 minutes. At an extreme level, it's good to know if a queue is 1 hour or 2 hours. But beyond that? Does it matter if a queue is 30 minutes or 35 minutes? 110 minutes or 130 minutes? I think sometimes there's an overpush on queue time accuracy: if a queue is advertised at 110mins and I queue 130mins, I've still queued about 2 hours for a ride, with added annoyance that I've queued an extra 20 minutes than I was told. It might be better if there's ranges that are advertised (0-10, 10-20, etc, 90-120, 120-150, etc). It buckles you up for the length of the queue, tempers expectations, but gives leeway for a park too. You can have the most accurate queue times in the world, but if they're long and / or slow, that's all people will care or remember about.

I do miss the old days however I'm very appreciative of the accessibility of theme park enthusiasm now. When I first got into rides it was a very white male dominated environment. Whilst that is certainly still true to some extent, I'm glad that meets through Towers Times for example seem much more diverse then before. I miss the discussion on forums though and twitter is certainly no replacement as opinions there are very much ingrained. The amount of people that tell me Zadra is top tier RMC... it just baffles the mind

I think with the expansion of Facebook and then Discord the groups on forums just migrated to those places. Being able to make posting footage of things a job also has made a massive contribution to the way the media of it all is consumed and distributed. How many construction updates were just someone taking photos on a random visit rather than being camped out for days on end or a 30 minute video with an asinine presenter and a click bait title? Also many who used them in the "heyday" have grown up, gotten jobs and lives that take precedent over forum times. I will say though some things do irk me about modern enthusiasts. Which isn't solely a theme park based issue. The almost cult-like following of certain "influencers" where their word is law, the way in which everything must be amazing or terrible with zero nuance to things. On the other hand, I do think some places had some very unwelcoming "veterans" and often internal politics/cliques/issues that did not help matters for newcomers or regulars. As mentioned though, this is not an issue solely in this hobby. There's a lot of forums I used to frequent which are very dead, even with there being constant new stuff happening. Discord is king now I feel of the old forum life.

Parc Asterix is such a great park and Toutatis and Oz'Iris are the perfect one two punch. They are just quality attractions. 😍

Looks like a great place! I was a little sad driving past this on the way to Disneyland, should have done a day here on that trip! Maybe next time. Glad you had a good time!

Asterix is a great park. Makes me wanna go back as it's got some serious quality. Also yay for not hating Goudrix. It gets a really bad reputation.

Love this. So glad ride to happiness redeemed itself in the end, as it would have been a long trip for it if it hadn’t!

Plopsa is a lovely little park and RtH has obviously been such a wise move for them. I've been to the park 3 times since its opened and never seen it on 2 trains (which included a trip in the middle of summer and it on a 1hr+ queue...), so hopefully they can operate and maintain it appropriately. Anubis is slept on a bit these days. Good ride. I'm intrigued to see what they do next. Their indoor Bumba World has no doubt filled a gap / extending the offering for younger audiences, but I thought it was a bit rubbish in comparison to the Maya Land, with the dark ride being quite weak. The park could probably benefit from a new, more modern, high throughput 1m restriction coaster. Vekoma/Gerstlauer have good offerings on that front. Big issue I have with Plopsa - as you noted - is the cost. Food is expensive and not good quality. Park tickets are reasonable enough, but then with parking, etc, it's not cheap. I've noticed that they've been doing more UK-focused marketing lately, so they do seem to be capitalising on their location more, so it'll be interesting to see what they do next. Looking forward to your thoughts on Asterix!!

Love a Mark9 trip report. Joint trip next year? 😉

Despite reports to the contrary, I honestly did not find PortAventura's operations, queues or Express Pass nearly as bad as expected, and I thoroughly enjoyed my 3 days there!

Honestly three days at Port Aventura deserves a knighthood or at least a medal of honour.

This is so lovely Matt ❤️ Brought back fond memories of my Grandad Keep making memories Matt. I hope you’ve got an ORP with him!

Fantastic, super detailed trip report there and love hearing following your grandads journey too. Glad you enjoyed your day.

Haha; that would be bang on! It’s interesting to hear that I’m not the only one who didn't like that ride… Yes, the weather was absolutely roasting! Oddly, though, it was almost like we were in some kind of parallel climate while we were in the East of England; despite the wall-to-wall sun while we were away, the weather was middling at home before we set off to East Anglia, and when I was back home in the South West on Wednesday, it was cold and raining!

Matt N: "Virginia Reel 1 was too intense for me" 😁 I didn't like it either Matt. Great post as always, and you had some great weather!

It's been a while! Only 438 notifications 😆

Hahaha, yeah those tubs are actively violent, but I love them for it!

Nice write up, again, thanks. Good pictures.

Thank you Josh! I’m loving all the details behind the scenes! A proper nerdy enthusiast binge this thread. I kind of agree with that last comment there - I don’t think it matters at all if the queue times are slightly off. At the end of the day, the queue time board really only serves to help you decide “ok let’s do it” or “woah nope not this time” - it’s a nice to know, but an estimate really is enough.

I’d be really interested to know how it works too! In all likelihood, it’s probably some degree of glancing and estimating from the staff. In some cases, I’m not even sure they do that; in one instance logged in my spreadsheet, Vampire at Chessington was advertised at 5 minutes, yet it was nearly out the entrance and I waited 60… I had an idea in my head of a near foolproof way of reliably estimating queue times. Imagine some sort of system that logs the amount of people entering and leaving the queue that’s paired with the ride computer system that logs the ride throughput, uniting queue entry/exit management and ride throughput management in perfect unison to make a wonderful, near foolproof queue time estimation system! Goodness knows how you’d implement it technically, but in the world of IoT and the like, it must surely be possible, at the very least… It’s unlikely to ever come to fruition, but I can dream!

Matt this is absolutely glorious. It’s a weirdly interesting topic that actually has a massive impact on a visit. I’d love to know how queue times are actually measured - or is it literally just a glance and an estimate? I remember some fanfare years ago about Saw the Ride having some sort of Bluetooth thing that tracks where people’s phones are, but that has always sounded like a lot of bs to me 🤷‍♂️

Great write up, I remember frequently reading many of the park forums back in the day, before deciding to join up myself. it does feel strange how different the theme park enthusiast world now is. Definitely more controlled and refine to say the least. Not to mention many of the additional park sites have closed and disappeared now also. Times do change.

Well worded and containing reflections of many of our thoughts. Oddly enough, the improvements in technology and availability of the contact, has disintegrated some forums and clubs, with splinter groups becoming cliques no longer open to "all members"; I have seen it with aeroplane clubs as well as coaster clubs, no doubt this applies to many hobbies. We all have a variety of interests and levels of knowledge which, in the older formats, could and would be shared with wider audiences. Enjoy your hobbies.

In answer to your question re Swarms restraints, yes they have been altered. Before, the vests would lock in place when the train was dispatched. This season they no longer lock in place. Much more comfy and I can actually breathe on the breakrun now 🤣

Well done Matt and good on you for going solo. Glad you had a great day

Your experiences on Inferno and Stealth kinda reflect the years they are having so far. The operations on both have been stellar so far so it feels like something has changed in management for them both to be nearly flawless. Inferno is probably at the peak of its thrill levels now, it is running beautifully at the moment and is feeling very intense.

As I intimated, my other main hobby is Aviation and luckily recently I combined a trip to Seattle with Toronto, and as we have discussed, things change; very few aircraft collections/museums now provide guides and likewise with theme parks. I was aware of fellow coaster enthusiasts who used to collect those guide/plans and for them, a major part of our hobby has gone. The comment from these establishments is "it's online".