JoshC.

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...

The Ride reopened earlier in the summer 😀

I don't think Exodus is in the limelight at the moment. The park have simply made a clear indication to the masses that they're building the UK's tallest coaster. For most people, that's huge news, and enough to spark interest. The park don't need to do any more advertising on that for a while yet, really. Whilst it's true that this time last year we were half way through the Fright Nights reveal, in previous years, reveals / announcements usually happen in mid-to-late August or early September. Perhaps a bit of a controversial opinion, but I think last year's slow burn announcement wasn't quite on the mark. The videos were great, don't get me wrong. But they didn't do a good job at showcasing each attraction, or communicating what each attraction was. Yes, they built up the story around the attractions, which was great for a small portion of the audience, but they didn't tell you what each attraction was (maze/scare zone/show) or accurately depict what to expect from it. Equally, the park only revealed new attractions in the last week of August. This year, the park could just do one big reveal for the entire event. Yep, I think another thing is they didn't want the Exodus video in the middle of any Fright Nights campaign. Could send mixed messages. Oktoberfest is, comparatively, a small event. Almost the forgotten child of the park's event line up (which I personally think should be scrapped, but that's another topic). They can focus on FN advertising whilst Oktoberfest is being prepped / starting. Yep, Jack and Kieran have done the videos for Fright Nights (and the Exodus video from Wednesday). I don't think that they've necessarily focused on Exodus over Fright Nights; it will be a creative decision from the park to not do any Fright Nights promo work yet.

And here's an issue I have with the park at the moment. They have been great at sharing updates geared towards geeks and those who are interested. The collaborations with Jack Silkstone over the years (pre-season videos, for example) have given a great insight into what to expect, some of the park's thinking, etc. But they're almost being too open. We go back to Tidal Wave's fire effect returning. That was announced for, what, 2021? And yet here we are, no fire effect in sight. Their communication about SRQ has been good. They trialled it on Saw last year (after a push to trial it from a Rides Team Leader), and expanded it to a couple of flat rides. They've said they intend to put it on Stealth too. But that was many months ago, and the official line has just been 'it's coming soon'. How long does it take to set up? I genuinely cannot understand why it is taking so long, especially since Stealth was designed to have a Single Rider Queue, which still exists. If they hadn't have said anything until it was confirmed and all but in place, it wouldn't have caused any issues. Even if they said "We're looking at putting it on more rides if possible - watch this space", that would be fine. But by announcing it, with no clear idea of when it could happen, it's created this situation which frankly could have been avoided. Hopefully they've learnt from that, and choose to be more selective with what they talk about. And they get SRQ up and running. I don't see Stealth's life as limited. Hydraulic launches are fine. Yes, Top Thrill Dragster had issues, and that's why they've changed that. Hydraulic launches are still not the most reliable and parks do still have issues with them. And yes, hydraulic launches are old hat now, with LSMs the launch of choice now (and rightfully so). But at the same time, Thorpe have got Stealth down to a tee. Yes, it's had a bit of downtime recently (a few days I believe). But aside from that, it's been reliable, rarely has a rollback, and is incredibly popular still. Okay, it's not going to be the tallest ride on park. But that's not big issue, when the tallest ride is only a bit taller and faster, and on the other side of the park. It still has a huge selling point and draw. People still lap it up. Thorpe aren't short on space, so don't have a need to remove it yet. And frankly put, there's other coasters which would be higher up on the list to be removed in my opinion. Doing a Top Thrill feels a bit unnecessary at the moment. It would have to be turned into a swing launch in all likelihood, which would require a significant rejig of the station. The whole process would be incredibly costly at a point when, again, that money could be better spent elsewhere. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.