JoshC.

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.

I predict that construction for Project Exodus will go vertical on Monday 9th October. I reckon the first supports will go in sometime between 11am and 1pm that day.

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

8 followed by a closed bracket - aka ) - gives 😎. It's an old school way of doing the sunglasses emoji which our forum software still uses. As you note, your averages are across quite a small sample, which isn't the most reliable. But it still gives some useful insight. This is pretty good, especially considering you mentioned there was some guest faff. Again, given there was guest faff, that's not bad. With it's onload/offload platform, batching procedures and the way bag collection is dealt with, Stealth should be pretty consistent. Saw hasn't operated with 8 cars for a number of years, and likely won't ever again. 770 is pretty painful for its popularity, although really not all that surprising for what it is these days. This is going to be hit hard next year being near Exodus. I mean, this is painful, but sadly what we've come to expect from Colossus these days. I can't remember the last time it ever did well, but it simply just doesn't do well these days. Another one that will be hit hard next year. Christ knows what the park have done to Inferno. Quite a few years ago (well, I guess we're getting close to a decade now, but whatever), Inferno was a throughput machine. The 1000pph mark was standard. Nowadays, 700 mark is good. It's better than like 5 years ago, when 600 was good, but it's really a sad situation to see. This really highlights the need not so much for Exodus to be a throughput machine, but to be able to have a solidly high throughput which it can easily maintain for years to come.

On the subject of Exodus, it seems possible that the core beams for maintenance building will be erected very soon. I thought that that route might have been used to move supports and track onsite, so it's interesting that's the first thing to be built (with parts then moved on site out of park hours through the park)

Ding dong, your opinion is wrong. But seriously, a couple of points: -I've had chats with Parma Violet and have removed some complete nonsensical rubbish they've posted. -Parm Prat's posts are every once in a while, and not constant/every other post -Parmesan Pamela posts at this point are a running joke post. In the past, we've had "Topspin", "4.5/10", "If I wanted to look at trees, I'd go to a garden centre". More recently we've had "Jart" and "Tidal Wave's fire" -More importantly, I think the sense of relief we'll get once Exodus opens and Parma Ham's posts become less frequent and annoying will be much more satisfying than us banning Ramp App (and them inevitably coming back as Parm Pap 2: Electric Boogaloo). It's a bit annoying, yes. Personally I find it significantly less annoying than the people on Twitter who are "in the know" and post future stuff as "#spectulation" and going 'it's just my opinion,👀 #Newfor2024'.

I rode Swarm today. Whilst there's certainly more supports, I wouldn't say the island is "filling up". They're also primarily white supports. Of course, they can (and will) store supports elsewhere too, so this shouldn't be a hard indication of how much is on park. I've seen a couple of people talk of track deliveries and vertical construction in the coming week. I haven't seen such rumours come from a usual reliable source. Equally, when supports were first delivered, there was no prior rumour going about. So I think any rumour should be taken with a big heap of salt. Not to say those things will happen this week, but don't count on it.

Mr Monkey is running fine. The replacement part took a long time due to high demand with the manufacturer (they had many projects at the time), increased time on making parts due to expenses in sourcing raw materials and increased time in shipping due to Brexit.

New "Scare and Entertainment" Zone for 2023, replacing Birthday Bash. Sounds like it will primarily be a show, with actors roaming around the area sometimes as well. It's a decent idea I think, assuming it can pulled off well. A similar-sounding experience was at Walibi Holland in the past and was pretty cool.

Well Trouble is Brewing I guess...

I delved into the plans for Exodus and had a look when we might see things go vertical: https://thorpeparkmania.co.uk/news/28-08-2023/When+Might+Project+Exodus+go+Vertical In short: -Vertical construction looks set to start mid-next month -Set to finish before Christmas -Testing to happen from late January -Potentially ready to open in time for Easter holidays

Crows scare zone is back for the 3rd time. With the Saw Alive queue gone, it'll be interesting to see how they use the extra space. I'm aware that the park looked at removing the queue last year for the event, so they've had a long time to think of what to do! --- It's interesting see the reaction to Trailers. I think it's got its place in the line up. Yes, it's not the scariest maze, but I think that's needed. Trailers is a more 'fun-scary' maze, which some people prefer over the out-and-out full on scare/gore type mazes. Obviously it's still a scare maze, and should achieve scares, but I'm fine with it being a tamer experience, so long as it can still deliver. I don't think the park are necessarily on a 3 year maze cycle. We're in a new phase of Fright Nights after 2020 completely changed plans. But also the only mazes which we've seen last 3 operating seasons in recent years were Living Nightmare and Creek Freak. Living Nightmare closed because of the Black Mirror, as opposed to a Fright Nights plan, and Creek Freak closed because of Exodus (though it would have been interesting to see what they would have done this year had that not happened). I think it's a shame that Trailers hasn't received any new scenes. It's clearly got the potential, and with the closures of Platform 15 and Creek Freak, they've had ample opportunity to do so. Hopefully they do so next year, should it remain (which I expect). It will be particularly interesting to see what the park plans to do next year. Do they expand the maze line up, adding a 4th maze, or do they keep the maze line up the same and focus on the other offerings on park?

First teaser: The line up seems like it will be revealed over the next week, with a new video at 7pm daily.

Jack Silkstone has released the first half of his Fright Nights documentary / BTS, where he details about his involvement with the teaser videos, marketing, etc: I haven't watched it all, nor the second half (which is released tomorrow). But, the amount of work that has gone into the teaser campaign is obscene. And I'm not sure I mean that as a compliment. The park had early ideas for Survival Games, the locksmith character, etc. shortly after last year's event finish. Which is great. And then Jack and Kieran and marketing had ideas for the teaser campaign. Jack and Kieran pushed for the teaser reveal campaign, with videos for each attraction. The corridor of locked doors was a custom-built set from scratch. The sheer number of man hours that went into building it, doing scenic work for it, having staff on hand for the shoot and so forth is insane. On top of that, each video had multiple hours of filming work put into it; prep work would start during the day, filming in the early afternoon and then go past midnight. I don't know how it works in terms of pay, but Thorpe actors tend to be on hourly wages, so just paying them for several hours adds up. Then whatever hours the permanent marketing members put in, plus whatever rate Jack and Kieran command. I absolutely admire Jack and Kieran's creativity, effort and the passion they clearly have for making the content they make for the park as fantastic as possible. But they themselves must have been running themselves into the ground creating this content. It's crazy. And for what? They created some cool videos, which have details and Easter Eggs far beyond noticeable comprehension. The videos created a world-building far beyond what the attractions can tell. Enthusiasts like the videos. But they don't do an accurate job of portraying what the attractions will be like. And they have next-to-no impact on the actual quality of the event. Again, it's very admirable what they have done, the scope given by the park and the preparedness of the park to put in the time and effort to create a high quality teaser campaign for the park's premiere event. And it's great that the park continue to give nods to geeks. But at the same time, one can't help but wonder if this is misplaced time, effort and (most importantly) money from the park. Especially when they could create a much more modest campaign for a significantly less effort and get similar results. And as mentioned, Jack and Kieran especially were putting in tons of hours of work into this. Definitely feels like they ran themselves into the ground a bit doing this. Clearly a labour of love for the cause.

So less the Future of Thrills, and more the Present of Thrills?

Nope. DBGT was the future of theme parks. Gosh, get your futures right Benin...

A little model of the ride will be going into the Megastore soon shades of the Colossus model during its construction.

Little update...