JoshC.

An unsurprising lack of interest for this..

Also: 😍😍

Some higher quality pictures of the Rookburgh Gazette: source Some further highlights from the paper: -The Charles Lindbergh hotel will have 114 rooms: 106 of them will be individual cabins for 2 people, and 8 of them will be the equivalent of two cabins and be for 4 people. -Uhrwerk will be the restaurant for the hotel for breakfast and dinner, but will be accessible from the park for guests during the day for lunch -Bar 1919 is a bar area on the lower levels of the hotel, and is exclusively for hotel guests Roughly, the story of Rookburgh is a 1920s Berlin-themed area with a focus on transportation and, naturally, flight, with a steampunk twist. So Rookburgh will be a 'sub-area' of the current Berlin area, much like how Klugheim is a sub-area of the Mystery area. And, in an amazing piece of detail, the newspaper is written with 1920s German spellings, colloquialisms and grammar. It's a subtle difference, but something which is truly fantastic imo.

And we have a name reveal and concept art: The STC will be called Hals-Über-Kopf, which literally translates to "Neck over Head", but is also a German phrase to mean 'in a hurry', 'headlong' or 'making a rash decision'. The Boomerang will be called Volldampf, which is "Full Steam" and feels a bit nicer to me!

Whilst I totally get your point of view, this is a very different thing to staff being rude to guests. The general comment was that staff are quite friendly and nice to guests. How they treat people behind the scenes and in their personal lives is very different, and not something that can really be judged by people who don't work there. Equally, it's not really fair to tar all staff with the same brush because of bad personal experiences you have had.

Enthusiasts can be way too critical. Regardless of your opinion on the individual rides, a top 5 coaster line up of Colossus, Inferno, Stealth, Saw and Swarm is a good, varied line up which do offer a lot of thrills. Couple that with some of their flats and support rides, and they do have a very good thrill line up. It's certainly not difficult to justify it as the best UK park for thrills imo

I dunno, the rides are pretty thrilling tbh...

We have a lift hill...

And this is why we quote hilarious typos Charlie 😢 I wouldn't expect anything crazy though Matt. I fully expect that it's just a grab and go sweet treat place with a name to match the theme of the area.

Phantasialand opens for Wintertraum today, and the park are stepping up Fly advertising with the 'Rookburgh Gazette': (Picture from one of the park's marketing team) Included in the paper is reference to FLY, Hotel Charles Lindbergh, the restaurant Uhrwerk (Clockwork), as well as newly revealed things Bar 1919 and Emilie Chocoladen & Candy Werkstatt (Emilie's Chocolate and Candy Workshop, which will presumably be a sweet shop)

>Theme park reduces opening hours to save money >Less people visit theme park because of reduced opening hours >Theme park keeps reduced opening hours because less people visit them >People continue not to visit because of reduced opening hours This is the problem with looking at attendance figures for deciding opening hours.

Which is ridiculous if true. They're a family theme park which caters for everyone. The opening hours should match that. Longer opening hours won't alienate the pre-school market, it'll just get more people in. But it's much more than a group of small enthusiasts. It's pretty much anyone else who doesn't go to school.

Towers is a park that attracts people from across the nation. Plenty of people are willing to drive 2-3hrs for a day trip there. What incentive do people have to visit the park on an off peak day when they're going to spend almost as much time driving as they are at the park? And if people don't want to go on a peak day, then they just won't visit.

The final wall is going up... Source

*blows dust off and chokes* In case you missed it on our social media pages, we'd love it if you could spend a few minutes giving us some feedback on the TPM social media pages and website. As ever, we're always open to suggestions and if there's anything you can think of, always feel free to message one of the Team! Much love x

Oooft, ermm.. Thorpe Park x15 Chessington x4 Alton Towers x4 Legoland x4 Phantasialand x2 Walibi Holland x2 Paulton's Park Linnanmäki Movie Park Germany Walibi Belgium Hellendoorn Slagharen Duinrell Drievliet Belantis Freizeitpark Plohn Karls Erlebnis-Dorf Elstal For rest of year, might hit up Chessington and Winter Wonderland but that'll be it. Solid varied year. Don't imagine next year will be as varied or exciting, but we'll see!

I wouldn't say that puts the rumour to rest. "Nothing has been decided" certainly implies it's possible that the ride could be closed next year so they can refurb it. I haven't listened to the video so apologises if what I'm say is just a repeat of what was said in that, but from what I've been told: -Valhalla costs over £1m a year to operate -The park need to spend approx. £900k to simply fix it up and make it ready to operate again -On top of that, the park want to spend extra money to improve the longevity of the ride (in the 20 odd years since it's opened, technology has improved, etc etc) So the logic is if the park close it for a year, they immediately save enough to do all the fix ups it needs. They can then have extra funds to, as Amanda puts it, make it more sustainable, and do it as one big project. For a ride like Valhalla, to hear the park want to make it more "sustainable" should ring alarm bells. That immediately sounds like they want to cut costs so it's less expensive to run. Of course, the key cost down to the water - pumping it around and making sure it's clean, so they can't cut that, but other things can be pulled I'm sure. Hopefully that's not the case and they're just planning on improve the hardware of the ride.

Fixed that for you

Boomerang has gone vertical:

So this is pretty much a certainty now. However, current rumours are that Tonnerre de Zeus (park's woodie) is going to be renovated for 2021. Some people have of course jumped to the conclusion of RMC, which I guess is a faint possibility at the moment, but there's nothing to suggest that either way. Asterix are owned by the same company as Walibi, and were very impressed by Untamed, so I guess it's only natural that those sorts of rumours will come about. But RMC conversions can be quite expensive. Untamed's conversion cost €12.5m for reference. Would they really invest that much in a renovation of a ride (which is already pretty well received), and then introduce a major new headline attraction the year after? Unlikely.

In theory, I guess yeah. But it would either mean reusing the old site and killing off Platform 15 (a bit of track at the start of the maze is workable, track throughout the whole maze much harder), killing off Creek Freak Massacre or building the track over water (very expensive). So not impossible, but just very impractical / expensive however they did it. We're in Closed Season - of course it's time for pointless conversations!

The major issue (ignoring that the station is for FN mazes as they could work around that if they really wanted to) would be how they'd have the train return to Old Town. There's no space for a loop now so that a train could return to the station facing the direction it would need to leave. They could go for trains which run in both directions but would end up with a completely different feel/

Don't expect an instantaneous switch. The take over is hardly seeing new people come into the business, it's just that the layering of people is different. The park have always had a LTDP, the trouble is that it's been chopped and changed so many times that it just hasn't worked. There may be some changes we see, but they wouldn't be down to the takeover. Equally, at this stage, don't expect to see anything exciting from outside the park. No plans have been submitted, and there's not even a whisper of anything interesting happening yet.

The big giveaway in that photo is the curved window. From very early on, it was never planned to be viewed or accessible from beneath the ride. Whether that was just a "we don't want people entering from ground-level" idea or "we consulted the illusionist and they said entering from ground-level is impossible" I don't know. But having seen how the illusion was designed, and how it looks from ground level, I'd be very surprised if it could ever have been designed to be viewed from beneath the train carriage in any way.

The recycling tax is very common (maybe even law?) in a lot of western European countries. Not something that's really advertised as it's taken for granted.