JoshC.

Fair enough. It's possible that took some inspiration from there then. Could also be purely coincidental. The 'creepy toys' idea isn't exactly original in the world of scare attractions. Neither is 'things from childhood becoming scary'. Thorpe could have seen the successes elsewhere and thought that they'd try to replicate. Equally could have just even their own idea and they didn't take inspiration from anywhere.

We can see in these photos from Silkstone that the weight of one piece of track is 2074kg: https://x.com/J_Silkstone/status/1707435850827497911?t=sHW_LBlLJpOckgy93D81aQ&s=09 So yeah, a good couple of tons per piece.

I don't know when the Doctor Who Toymaker/Emporium stuff came into the public domain, but it could also be purely coincidence.

"record throughputs" sounds like a slight exaggeration. Or, at least, for a very specific definition of 'record', as I doubt they're getting the best ever. Still, positive to see they're getting good throughputs. Realistically, I'd've thought the introduction of a single rider at Stealth wouldn't make a negative impact to train dispatches, but given at the moment they don't really batch and people just sort themselves out, I can see why a SRQ may cause problems. The fire effects comment goes back to something I've said before. Even though they're saying no promises, there's obviously no indication as to when they may be able to get them operational, and just wishful expectations. Feel like they should just keep stum on that.

It looks like deliveries are taking a *step* in the right direction...

Colour me pessimistic but until said upgrade happens, I won't believe it till it happens. That said, it's a good and necessary thing to be investigating and will definitely help. It's ultimately a cheap thing to do too, so whilst something like new trains would be better, this does the job for now.

Here's an alternative view: It doesn't seem like the bus will be capable of moving with those stands there. I'd also be surprised if that was ever considered, just from a H&S perspective. I guess the main reason for its inclusion is to allow for the controls for the AV equipment to be stored somewhere. It's on theme and also somewhere for actors to pop to as necessary.

This is a placeholder post. I will edit this post when vertical construction starts, claiming the exact date and time it will go vertical. It's the perfect crime.

I eagerly await their 2am tweet at me, thanks for the heads up.

Yeah, no.

Oh definitely. But when I said significantly more white than gold supports, I really meant it - I could see maybe about 5 or 6 gold supports to a sea of white. Obviously that's just from a quick glimpse and there could be more elsewhere, but that few gold supports wouldn't take long to install, and wouldn't be enough to sustain many white supports on top either!

Sadly no clue. I know it's quite a recent change (last couple of years), so not a result of the Smiler incident, or any other theme park accident that I'm aware of. It could just be a 'Stealth-like' scenario where they choose to rotate the annual maintenance of cars. So they have 7 cars available, with the 8th being serviced / used as a quick spare part replacement, a la Stealth, where the 3rd train is always being serviced. But again, I stress I have no idea. Definitely cynical, in that this wouldn't have been the reason. The park would not have gone "Inferno is running too efficiently, never has a long queue queue to sell enough Fastrack, we need to slow it down". The departments in charge of Operations and Fastrack are completely different, and beyond communicating throughput numbers, will have little interaction with one another. And certainly the Fastrack department would not be able to ask them to slow down, nor would anyone higher up. However, whatever the reason for the slowing in operations and reducing throughput over the years, it is certainly a by-product that Fastrack is more appealing. And I'm sure they're likely to sell more tickets as a result. A recent change on bigger rides I've noticed is that staff now have headsets to communicate with each other, rather than the phones. This means they can be in constant communication with each other, and don't have to stop to do so. This has pros and cons, but there's now no longer this scenario of people walking over to a phone to have a goss with each other.

It's not really any different to any other pirate ship. However, everyone reacts differently to different rides. It's not too uncommon for people to be okay on larger pirate ships and feel queasier on smaller ones.

From what I've seen from Swarm, there's significantly more white supports than gold? Is that pretty accurate? Could still be a while before installation if there's not a lot of gold on site

Whatever it is, I'm sure Tulleys will end up tweeting me saying it's the best thing since sliced bread, since their social media team seem to have an unhealthy obsession with me. #BigShot