JoshC.

Today was the first 9pm closure, and it should be said it was a fab day. It's a shame as the weather seems to have put people off. Today was probably the quietest day I've seen the park this summer. This did have the upside that there were short queues; everything was more or less a walk on from 7.30, Hyperia aside. I guess the issue with a late closure is, if there's no extra entertainment/reason to stay later, people won't. We see with Fright Nights people stay. But something like this, there is no incentive to visit and stay late beyond more ride time. And some people may think "longer open hours = busier = longer queues". On the flip side, I hope it improves guest satisfaction further. There's another thing to be discussed: Hyperia. Hyperia is still advertised, as it has been since reopening, as possibly closing before the park does. It has done this on some days, and others it's remained opened till close (or even a few minutes after). The ride closed its queue at 8.30. It was advertised as a 40min queue (which was about right). So the park are well within their rights to do this. There was also an announcement in the area at 8.20 this was happening, as people were loitering. There's quite a few complaints on Twitter circulating because of this. It's a layered one, as I do think that they could.improve their communication here. The other side of the coin is the reason they close earlier is because they want to stop a mad rush of people going and extending the queue time dramatically. A lot of the complaints I'm seeing are from people who wanted to get a night ride on Hyperia and were leaving it as late as possible. I see the frustration that people have, but I also see it from the park's perspective too. Ultimately I think it's a minority of park visitors who are complaining about it, but the park should also see if there's an alternative way to communicate an early closure. To get back to the main point though. 9pm closure good. Thank you Thorpe. Great job. Let's hope it proves successful.

The 'Make Your Mark' extra was a thing last year too. If memory serves me correctly, options included being able to have your name on a door in Death's Doors, your name being included on the food products in the Brainsburys scene in Trailers and others. It is free money for them effectively; printing a name on a piece of paper / cardboard and sticking that there. Take a photo of it, make a simple digital certificate of authenticity and bam, profit. The platinum options are a bit more involved and actually pretty cool. The Trailers "have a film poster with your name on" one meant you had some say in the design of the poster (I guess a simple "what sorta film would you be in"). You would get a level of say in the design of the graffiti tag in the new maze. The Graveyard Cross in Crows is something that would be seen a lot and recognised more too. The big question...why? Well, in recent years, "Easter Eggs" have been a huge thing in Merlin attractions. Some are more in your face, others are more subtle. By doing that and, with Thorpe in particular via Jack Silkstone videos, drawing attention to them, it makes people want one of their own. People will willingly pay £15 to have their name in a maze. They might try and find it, but if they've got a photo of it and certificate saying their name is there, they get the bragging rights, which is all they want. The big kicker is that the Silver and Gold ones are tiny. Let's have a look at the Silver options Stitches – Naughty or Nice Christmas list Trailers – Staff notice board Survival Games – Leaderboard Ask yourself two questions for each of those (if you've done the maze): 1. Do you know where that specific theming piece is? 2. Could you name any of the names on there? For Survival Games, I could not tell you where the Leaderboard is (maybe this is something they're adding in). The other two maze, I've seen, and only had the chance to read names thanks to Press Night runs. At the moment, they feature actual names of people involved in the creation of the mazes, rather than people who paid for it. For those people on the original props, it's a nice "Hey, I helped build this, and I've got my name in there". For everyone else, if you see them, it's a nice little extra prop. Let's look at the Gold options: Stitches – Name a toy Trailers – Name a doll Survival Games – Name a cell All three of those are easier to know where they are, but seeing a name there is much harder. Again, 95% of people won't notice any names on them. The whole Easter Egg culture has spiralled a bit. In the past, they were just something you could put in and no one would be none the wiser. Some designers like to put their name somewhere in attractions, like a signature. Now it's becoming an expected thing, and people hunt for them and want to know where they are, which worries me a bit, as it can distract from the experience. The one that stands out to me is how it was mentioned that in Survival Games, one of the scenes features a severed penis that's labelled JS, an Easter Egg to Jack Silkstone. When people found out about this, people were looking out for it more than focusing on the scene it was in. People are weird. I do hope people don't do that with their own names. [In saying all this, I'd've loved my name on a cross in Crows. Yes I'm weird. No, I make no apologise. But I didn't buy one]

Rode this yesterday and was surprised to see that, once inside, there was still a queue of people in there, going down the cattlepen ramp (filling up two rows of it). The way it was running, it meant there was a solid 15 minute wait there. Ignoring the fact that goes against the story set up (we're being rushed in because of a Walker attack), it also just grates having to stand in a queue where you're hearing a huge siren/crash every couple of minutes. The whole indoor walkway is more of a scare maze scenario, and standing in it simply isn't ideal. Don't mind a couple of trains' worth wait (helps in case there's a delay with pre-show or people being slow getting to the station), but the huge wait was a faff. Also caused operational issues as it meant groups of people who joined through the SRQ then clumped together, and rode together. I was in a group of 3, and we ended up being split across 2 different trains. This isn't the first time this has happened admittedly, but it's only been something that's I've experienced once or twice before. I hope this isn't a regular occurrence now, as operationally it doesn't make sense, it's annoying to queue in there, and it goes against the story (I doubt AMC, who are known to be very strict with how their Walking Dead attractions operate, would be happy, for example!)

Hi all! After an undetermined period of time, we have launched a completely new version of the main Thorpe Park Mania website: https://www.thorpeparkmania.co.uk/ Huge shout out to @Marc who has done wonders with the design of it all. With the new site, we have temporarily lost a lot of our old news articles, but these are slowly being added back. Equally, we're still adding in more content over the coming days/weeks/months. We have a couple of new articles: our Ghost Train BTS and Colossus Lift Hill Walk, with more to come. We're also building up one of the most extensive Fright Nights archives out there. We'll be adding to it continually over the next few months, but check it out here: https://www.thorpeparkmania.co.uk/index.php/fright-nights/ As always, feedback is welcome, especially any issues you see, or anything else you'd like to see on there.

What a world we live in where we can buy the opportunity to have our names written in mazes. I'd love to do it (they have a Trailers one where you can have a poster designed for you and put in the lobby), but money. Here's the options in full: Silver Option - £15 Stitches – Naughty or Nice Christmas list Trailers – Staff notice board Survival Games – Leaderboard ‘Project Sophie’ – Guest List Includes a digital certificate. Names will feature once in the maze selected during the 2024 Fright Nights event. Buy before 8th September to be included the 2024 event. Gold option - £35 Stitches – Name a toy Trailers – Name a doll Survival Games – Name a cell ‘Project Sophie’ – Name a bottle Includes a digital certificate. Names will feature once in the maze selected during the 2024 Fright Nights event. Buy before 8th September to be included the 2024 event. Platinum options: Crows Graveyard Cross: £45 (5 spaces available) Trailers movie poster in exit lobby: £120 (5 spaces available) Project Sophie tag on graffiti wall: £120 Also, this: Feels a bit rushed / lacking of QA that when you go through to the purchasing options, there's no pictures or descriptions. Shouldn't go live like that in my opinion. As for what Project Sophie could be, as @MattyMoo says, I'm wondering if we're going to see a party gone wrong vibe. Start of the maze is you trying to get into a party, waiting "outside" alongside graffiti-ed walls, and you can only get in if you're on the guest list. You then end up sneaking in, and then it turns out the party is a front for something more sinister, or something goes wrong. The bottles could simply being bottles of 'alcohol'. If this wasn't Thorpe, I'd suggest the maze could be a massive drug trip at a party, but that seems too risqué for them. I've experienced something similar with the Hostel maze at Movie Park Germany. It starts off as a massive party atmosphere (not too dissimilar to the film), before it completely switches to the horror side in a flash. Something like that could be done really well.

Death's Doors currently hasn't been constructed. This time last year, the set was complete (unsure how much of the tech stuff was rigged up). This was presumably done because of the amount of man hours needed to build Stitches. Which then begs the question, what's the deal now? -Is Death's Doors returning? -Has the park's technical team grown? -If Death's Doors isn't returning, is a new scare zone taking its place? Or is the new maze effectively taking its place? I'm finding it particularly interesting that there's been minimal activity at Black Mirror from the outside. When mazes have been built in that location in the past, it's been a hive of activity outside. Obviously UVE are the ones building the attractions these days, so I guess a lot of the buck and planning stops with them.

Tbf I don't think anyone realistically thought we'd get anything taller than Stealth at Thorpe back in 2013. You'd definitely would have had people scoff at you if, back then, you suggested the next coaster was still 11 years away, and would have been a chain lift coaster taller than Stealth.

I felt like backwards seating was addressed by him saying "It wouldn't be comfortable". Equally, we know anything is possible. And during Swarm's construction, they explicitly said there would never be a backwards row, so it became a bit of a long-standing joke. So by not out right saying no, it covers the slim possibility it will happen. As for Project Exodus being considered up to 500ft... I'd imagine 500ft was sort of thrown around in a brainstorming sort of phase. Like: "What if we wanted to build the WORLD'S tallest roller coaster?" "Well, the tallest at the moment is 456ft. So we'd have to beat that...what if we went up to 500ft?" "Saudi Arabia are looking at building the tallest/fastest/longer coaster and that's going to be above 500ft" "Hmmm yeah, this sounds a bit much" Realistically I doubt they ever considered anything anywhere close to 500ft, but it's a cool number to throw around for the wider audience. Also, in terms of practicalities, it's just not. I'd love to know what their early brainstorms were like though. I wouldn't be surprised if they did genuinely table ideas of "Tallest non-launched coaster in the world" (ie beating Fury 325) or "Europe's tallest hyper coaster" (ie: what Hyperion was marketed as at opening). The latter isn't too crazy to consider either: Hyperion is only 17ft taller. Presumably, budget, space, engineering considerations, impact to the local area (noise) and more would be what stopped that happening.

Unsurprising given the make up of the park at the moment, but in a recent "roller coaster day week" video from Merlin, there's a little suggestion that a new coaster could go on the island behind Swarm. For what it's worth, there have been ideas for coasters to go there in the past, with loose proposals for a 2015, 2020 and 2024 coaster.

Not great. In the past, when Thorpe ran Fright Nights consecutively for most of October, they would only be open until 8pm on off peak days, and that was with mazes opening at 4pm. And, to be fair, it worked well then, although was ultimately cut because it wasn't worthwhile. The difference here is that we are seeing a real time cut in hours with the week before half term, in that they are open one hour less. You have to wonder too, given Towers' location, how worthwhile and appealing those hours are for staff, and how much of an impact that hour lost has on them. One does have to wonder why there's these cuts. What's the reason for them? The park seems lively enough with visitors. When I went at the end of July, a day which was reduced from 6pm to 5pm, the park was more than busy enough to justify at 6pm close. Presumably it is to do with staffing. If that's the case, reducing opening hours makes it less appealing to would-be, and existing, staff surely? But then, how do they attract and keep staff? A vicious circle.

*raises a hand to cut the music á la Simon Cowell* It's gonna be a no from me. Don't quit your day job Parm Pap.

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

Thorpe Park is 2.5 miles away from me as the crow flies, 4.8 miles travel distance. How often do I visit? Ehhhh, more than enough. Usually once every couple of weeks on average I'd guess, sometimes a bit more. More recently, I've been spurred to visit slightly more regularly as I can pop in for a couple of hours, get some rides on Hyperia via SRQ, and then go home.

I can only confirm my experiences at Thorpe, but can hazard a guess as to what would happen at other parks. At Thorpe, the Rides Department is split into different areas, and each area has several rides. The idea is that, at first, you would be trained on 1 or 2 rides as a host, before maybe being trained further on more rides, or being trained to be an operator. Each area has a selection of smaller and bigger rides. What rides you were trained to host on didn't matter. However, the usual procedure for being trained as an operator would be you'd be trained to operate a smaller ride first, before eventually being given a bigger ride. You would also need to know how to host that ride too. If a ride is closed for an extended period of time, and the park know this, the staff would be used in a variety of ways. One or two might be expected to stand at the ride's entrance to speak with guests (yes, even if the ride is closed for several weeks). Some may be asked to do extra cleaning of the queue line (as this is ride staff responsibility). Others may be trained on new rides. The other thing is: ride hosts are paid minimum wage, operators not much more. You will find, especially in the UK, there's a high turnaround of staff, and it can be tight to staff everything without having to get Rides Team Leaders / Managers to run rides. Just one or two staff absences can throw plans out the window. So having a ride closed can mean that they just get used as sick cover too. I'd expect it is very similar at Alton Towers. Whilst it is about 15ish people as a minimum who need to be trained on Wicker Man for it to run daily, there would be more people who would be trained on it (in case of absences, etc), who would also be working on other rides, and vice versa. I wouldn't say hours are cut, but I knew of times when people were asked if they wanted to go home early (and obviously getting paid less). At Thorpe, given the average age of rides staff is quiet young, there would be people who would willingly take that, since they might prefer a few hours extra off over working and it doesn't impact them as much financially. It would be very unlikely for staff to go into other departments since you would need department training, etc. I know Towers have permanent roles for Hosts where you're trained in several departments, so you might be put into your other department if you were in this situation, but that's not really a displacement. I guess sometimes staff might be asked to litter pick around the park too. Now this is an interesting one. If there's an expectation that the ride could reopen, there's expectation that the ride team should be available. If engineering say "Oh, it will take us about 3 hours to fix this", you don't want to displace the ride team for that ride for exactly 3 hours. Ideally, you wouldn't do it at all, in case it only take 30 minutes. So, pretty much, staff are just hanging around, waiting. You should have someone at the entrance to give the standard line "It's closed, we don't know how long for", etc. But everyone else? They might be asked/expected to do a bit of cleaning of the queue line, but aside from that, it's a case of standing around waiting. Weather delays at Thorpe are the worst for this. You'll get the weather alert on the system telling you to stop operating the ride. And then you just have to wait. It could be hours before you can go again. I have not-so fond memories of standing in Swarm's stations for hours in pouring rain and heavy wind, knowing the ride won't reopen any time soon, but having nothing else to do.

Perfect example from Benin there. And (again, as Benin said) if they need new parts from abroad, it will take time. It's not a major thing, presumably, because the structural integrity of the affected area hasn't come into the question. But work still needs to be done.

Fake news. It's Gerstlauer doing the spike.

I do wonder how much of a difference it makes. I'm certainly not against it (themed/stylised pre-recorded messages telling you what to do is a win in my eyes). But do people take it in? Do people listen? Do they even notice? Who knows. As I say, I'm not saying they shouldn't do it, but I do wonder if it makes any difference. On that note, I wonder if a themed one at Hyperia would have the same effect. Having someone tell you it, a voice which you haven't heard in the queue or elsewhere, which is less polished, makes people pay slightly more attention I think. Adds to the sense of "you need to do this". Again, no harm in a themed one being made, but would it have the same effect, if any? Obviously these are broader questions for the industry in general, just something I'm thinking out loud about.

Fine. It's just like any other ride, but bigger.

RAP is no longer one go, it's just like any other ride

I think once Fastrack is in full effect, the main queue will hold roughly 90-120mins worth of queueing. That's not too dissimilar to their aims for other rides. The challenge comes in a few years when it's not the big shiny new thing, and ensuring it still runs the best it can. I think once it settles it will be fine. But it will be interesting to see if they end up having to "do a Taron". Taron had a main queue originally capable of only holding about 40 minutes of waiting time. That's why Phantasialand had to add the extension of Doom, which was originally unthemed.

To be fair, Summer Nights was a paid-for extra, and had the advertising hook of "no queues for the coasters". Which was true at first, then when people cottoned on, it got too popular and meant there were queues... This is the big thing. For the UK market, just being able to stay longer isn't enough. It means more rides, sure, but in the public's eyes, that means more queueing, which people are usually fed up with by 5-6pm anyways. It's why, despite the extra queueing, Fright Nights does work with late opening, because there's something extra to fill your day. Hyperia evening rides might entice a few hundred more people to stay. But realistically they should offer more. Or, failing that, an evening ticket (5-9pm maybe?) might get a few more paying guests in through the door? On that note, it will be interesting to see how Universal operates if it does indeed come to the UK. Will the name and (presumed) quality = and associated cost - be enough to get people to stay longer? Will their non-ride offering (shows, dining, etc) encourage people to stay? Or will they equally be a "close by 6-7pm because the Brits like to go home early" park?

Likely to be a battery pack, phone, vape or similar which was in someone's pocket, flew out and became damaged on impact, hence the smoke. That section of track is away from all smoke machines and similar. It is literally just track. So the only way it could have been a malfunction of the ride is if there were excessive sparks that flew between wheels and track which led to the wood catching fire, which is extremely unlikely. An unfortunate situation, but hopefully one which doesn't need much work.

Wonderful news. I know they've been talking about it behind the scenes for a while, so good to see it's come to fruition. I know some people will say the park should be open that later regardless over summer, but it has always been the case that the demand isn't there. Trialling it / doing it on select days helps test the waters. Hopefully this can be a step to later summer closing, and maybe even the park testing 10pm Fright Nights closes again.

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.