JoshC.

Having not ridden it, or seen the restrictions, I can't be sure exactly, but I'll throw this out there... What ride restrictions do you mean exactly? 'Hold on tight and brace yourself', 'Sit back', 'Put your head in this position'? Or were there very specific rules? If it's a simple instruction like hold on tight, how can a park truly enforce then, when most people will put their hands up, etc? If it's a very weirdly specific rule, then that says to me something isn't right!

If a ride is in a position where there's a high risk that guests can injure themselves through their own actions, then that's an issue with the ride itself which needs addressing. For a (slightly OTT) analogy - if a car exploded every time it went above 80mph, you wouldn't say "well it's the driver's fault because the national speed limit is 70, so they should never hit 80". You'd get the issue resolved, or if it can't be resolved, stop people using the car.

Phwoar

Vortex did indeed open in 2001. There's been no news either way about Vortex. It's currently just listed as unavailable / closed, but there's no indication that it's leaving either. Usually in these situations (where a ride is closed for a long period of time with no obvious work happening to it), the park are waiting on behind the scenes stuff (like a new part, for example) to come in. I'd be very surprised if it doesn't return at some point.

Maybe, just maybe, Project Zer0 is an independent scare attraction, which will be based in Tolworth? A clever person would certainly piggyback marketing themselves off of a huge event like Fright Nights. There's also the fact that ScareTOUR, who are incredibly in the know about all things scary, are suggesting that an old maze will be returning for Fright Nights this year as the 'new thing'.

Clearance testing has begun: Man sunbathing on lift hill: All photos posted by PabloA on Coasterforce.

Aaaaaaaand in the interest of fairness, I had a decent ride on Wicker Man this week. I didn't love it as much as everyone else seemingly does, but it had some good laterals and was well paced. So I can now see people's perspective more on why they rate it so highly. If that experience is an indication of how the ride will run usually, then good. It's not something I rate highly, and I'm still not sold on the pre show for a family ride, but it seems to be doing the trick for Towers. Speaking of the pre show, the curtain wasn't rising during my visit. Apparently if people pull on it, it causes it to break, and being so low hanging, people do tug on it. Thanks to having two projectors for the second half of the pre show, when the curtain breaks, it does look quite dodgy.

Wooo! Getting very excited for this; hopefully we get some testing soon. And having the ride open by early September would be very nice thank you very much...

Surprised they didn't use Smiler in a sense of irony tbh

I guess it also comes down to context a bit. RMC's most notable accidents are almost definitely as a result of a manufacturer fault, as opposed to how the park has operated / maintained the ride. For a new company, that could ring alarm bells to potential clients. Other manufacturers will have plenty of incidents attached to their rides, some as a direct fault of them, some as a result of the park (I'm willing to bet that a greater majority are down to park error). But they will all have a much larger track record of success, and Merlin will have an established working relationship with those manufacturers. Of course, we don't know what goes on behind closed doors, at both ends, so who really knows what they think. Maybe Merlin have no concerns about getting an RMC. Maybe we are getting one in 2020. Fairly certain that when Heide Park announced they were reopening Colossos, they said they considered making it a hybrid, Which almost definitely would have meant RMC would have been involved, but they decided to keep it as it was or something? At the same time, if Merlin didn't want to go to RMC over concerns about the safety record at the moment, I could see why.

It just always strikes me as odd that when one park does something well, it always has to be justified further by saying "Well, it's better than this". You don't watch a great film, say it's great, then say "and it was better than a rubbish film". Yet it seems almost normal to do that with theme parks. I just don't get it.

Very pretty:

That's arguably the most pedantic ever raised in regards to Loggers Leap. It's quite clear what the meaning of the tweet is.

Difference is that the Spinball incident happened at Towers and Merlin know what caused it. They hear that a manufacturer has a big new ride, and on its opening day, two trains bumped together. This follows another incident where they got another manufacturer involved in one of their rides, which directly caused the death of a person. They might still go for an RMC. But you can understand why they'd perhaps be against introducing one of safety grounds.

The boat ride area and surrounding lake has been filled up: It's all coming together!!

Don't quite see what Towers' rapids having less boats than normal has anything to do with Europa's rapids being open?

I don't agree with the way they handled the announcement, etc., but I highly doubt their logic was simply "we are opening a new coaster, let's rip one down to balance the books". Wild Mouse had plenty of issues and H&S problems related to it, all of which are expensive. Especially considering how much H&S is in the spotlight at theme parks, you have to wonder at what potentially spending hundreds of thousands of pounds becomes worth it, when they are going to have to do it again and again. And then what would happen if it ever became listed; they could potentially end up with a ride which isn't safe to run / too expensive to repair, but can't be torn down. Things like this aren't black and white. It's a shame what's happened, but you have to wonder how much time Wild Mouse really had in it. Maybe it had to go this year, maybe it didn't, but it really did seem like it could cause the place more problems than it's worth.

Tonight:

Trains are on the track! First test run either took place tonight or will take place tomorrow.

Did this the other day. It's fair to say that chucking more actors in a maze doesn't always make things better. However, the second half the maze (the Asylum-inspired section) is certainly a lot more intense, being surrounded by multiple actors and attacked from all angles. It's a shame there's still not a real ending though. The pre show is a mixed bag. Not having people knell loses the big Walking Dead/Negan link, and it makes it less dramatic. However picking people off one-by-one / in small groups is clever. Giving Negan a microphone is a welcome addition though (at least, I don't remember the actor having one last year?). It's hard to judge how popular / well received the maze is at the moment. Lots of people queued outside waiting for it to open, there was a reasonable sized queue all day, etc, so that's something. Whether it's proven to be a successful decision for the park we won't know until Fright Nights I guess.

This has been worked on for quite a while; good month or two. That news report came out within the last week, so just coincidence. But yes, fantastic to see, and certainly a step in the right direction (and in the 21st century).

It's not going to be that simple though, really, is it Coaster. The UK public best respond to new things being introduced within the park. Merlin have arguably dug themselves into a deeper hole by always adding new stuff too. Imagine if the park didn't introduce I'm a Celebrity, The Walking Dead The Ride, Living Nightmare Extreme and other small investments with potentially limited lifespans and high operation costs, and that money was saved over, say, 5 years for opening Loggers. There would be less guests coming, guests would be less satisfied since there's nothing new at all, and the money that would have been invested elsewhere still hasn't made its way into Loggers yet. That means less profit for the park, which means more cuts, and more pressure to spend money on a quick fix to help make a long term plan actually work. There are of course other potential things to invest in, which may last longer, but I don't think Thorpe are in a position to simply not invest.

This week is clearly the week to be finishing off European coasters.

If any attraction isn't open for whatever reason, they close the queue line so no one can enter. They're logic, quite sensibly, is that if an attraction is unavailable, people shouldn't be able to join a queue for it. It's probably nothing serious. Mazes stop running for a variety of reasons, maybe an actor was accidentally hit, maybe someone was too scared and ran and tripped, maybe a lightbulb needed replacing. It was open again so it's no big issue and nothing to worry about.

The start section after the Negan pre show was sort of multi-route for a bit (though they ended up creating a more forced route later in the event I think?), so that might be why you've seen extra rooms. The chair scene isn't new, though I never had any interaction with it during my run-throughs last year.