Marc

There are 2 shifts - engineers are at the park till around 11pm.

I still think its far far to early to judge, with the exception of Storm Surge Thorpe generally do care what the park looks like and I've no doubt when this is complete it wont look as awful as the construction pics make it out to be. We will see in march I guess!

If you could get us a picture of one of them ride building around 2 hours after the building was constructed id love to compare

Maybe we should wait till March next year to judge how good / bad this looks?!

Sounds like there was an issue with the park wide system if all that was broken!

Or maybe they are working on improving the ending in reaction to guest feedback and instead of closing it completely they are re-routing the maze whilst this is in progress?

Many rides are much more likley to shutdown in the rain, Nemesis Inferno is a good example and is very prone to shuttng down in the rain and stopping on the lift - If the rain is bad it makes much more sense to stop running for a short time IMO.

So basically the weather over Thorpe right now... ? Different rides are affected differently.. I'm not saying all water rides are affected, just certain ones at thorpe certainly automatically shutdown with the slightest change in water levels.

Come on Benin... I'm sure your more aware than most that heavy rain can affect water rides more than other rides with water levels and what not...

I dont see your point? Are you saying they should buy another fair ground ride not really designed for a theme park environment so we can all moan about its reliability in a few years time?

Do they though? if you scan through a few parks on queue-times.com a fair few parks seem to have 3/4 rides closed at any one time..

No it dont solve the underlying problem of the current bad reliability but with no Short-term fix its the best the park can do to compensate guests. Its a bit silly to think the park will be happy about a situation like this, its in their best interests for everything to be running perfectly instead of needing to give everyone comp tickets.

The park are re-validating guests tickets today by the looks of things.

What makes you say that?

I think the ones from the lift are old yeah , the ones in the side of the trough are definitely new though

They did trial something on Stealth which counted people entering the queue and then leaving at the exit, I guess this would give them a real time throughput and work out a queue length but the equipment is long gone so I assume it didn't work too well. They are not usually that far off with queue times, they have a member of staff walking round updating them. Imo it's always better to slightly over estimate the queue length too... If stealths queue States 30 minutes but you get on in 20 your happy, if it says 30 but it takes longer people are much more likely to complain.

Half agree / disagree.. Slammer when it's working is actually pretty reliable... It's most recent major down time was for them to install a new system on the ride, apart from that touch wood other than opening late this year it's been running pretty well. Agree with samurai..but then not to sure what else they could fit in the space, and it's better than them laying some turf!

Rode storm surge last night and noticed new squirt effects have been added around the trough - mainly around the top bit. Gets you a little more wet now

Theres no reason why vortex SRQ wont work - they will be batched in with everyone else before the ride starts. Good move by the park and hopefully we will see this re-introduced on other rides

There was a van / trailer outside the ride on Saturday evening so I assume they have been waiting for a part.

Music is also very loud now and has a load of smoke now

They are sharp because they were replaced over closed season.

Didn't think fastrack was sold for iac - last time I was there all the signs had been removed.

I never stated merlin or our parks were perfect - they are not the best in the world either but for the size of the UKs industry / target audience they are in my opinion overall good. Sorry I disagree there - the parks / merlin do listen to feedback and where needed act upon the feedback - just because they don't address every criticism on somewhere like here don't mean they don't listen to the feedback from the majority of their audience. Imo the budget cuts are a total separate issue here - as a business they have to look at ways of limiting damage so to speak in a way to affect guest experience the least - unfortunately if the parks are not hitting targets then money has to be recovered from somewhere. I don't think you can assume that overall the parks have low customer satisfaction - you can't base that from posts on here. A good example is reserve n ride - the majority on here hate / are against it - where as the majority of guests who fill out the surveys at the end of the day of using it praise the service - sure that's just one example but I think you would find that's the general picture across most things. Your right - I'm sure they could match anyone - ultimately it's down to the money spent - but I'm not convinced the UK industry is big enough or has enough interest in it for that level of investment

Wasn't really aimed at you or anyone in particular! We know shutdowns happen and always will do - generally Thorpes reliability is pretty good over recent years (apart from Samurai!)