Benin

And it's a park where Fastrack makes the trip so much better, otherwise you'd be spending hours in stuffy cattlepens being queuejumped every 5 minutes... Like, I'd never visit the park without it now, especially given the potential for Kgan and Shambles whorage <3

Didn't help with the floods last year causing the filters to clog up due to the dye either... Some park issues aren't in their control...

Swarm cost also includes groundwork and marketing, presumably to make it appear more expensive and marketable...

Do the cars get stripped down in the Stealth workshop? Swear that has space for two trains if so... Otherwise that was poorly planned wasn't it?

Chessie's don't have seatbelts... Never have done... Probs the design of the bar makes the difference, since Chessie's are overtly huge and uncomfortable...

Two seats at the front right end don't have restraints for some reason...

You should see the negativity on other sites if you think it's bad here... People suggest scrapping Fastrack because of the way Thorpe operate it I reckon... It's oversold and causes the queuetimes for the average guest to be substansially longer, which of course leads to further complaints... Of course the best way to deal with that would be both to limit the numbers available per hour (20% of theoretical throughput per hour perhaps?), not throw Fastrack at every complaining guest, and level the playing field by bringing back free Fastrack for all... Reserve and Ride as an idea from the off seems flawed, as the park are (as mentioned) trying to acheive the rather unacheivable, especially flawed in a park where the only thing to do is go on rides... Parks like Chessie or Towers would probably benefit from this scheme a lot more because there is a lot more non-ride things to do in both of them... Where do people go in Thorpe if they're waiting for their time slot? Into other ride queues, which will of course build up immensely given that most of the 5 coaster queues tend to get between 1000-1500 people per hour, so you're going to have 5000+ (assuming an hour long queue worth of people) more people milling around the park itself 'queuing' for those coasters whilst queuing for other rides at the same time... It's almost like they're trying to fix what isn't directly broken (I.e. normal queuing, Fastrack methods ARE broken)... Which confuses me as there's many better ways to actual make the queueline part of the ride experience... Look at the way Disney are doing queues with interactive features for one end of the scale, or making heavily themed queues, or making queues that interact with the ride, or making the queues more interesting that flat cattlepen mazes... There are lots of ways that any park can take a queue and make it an interesting, fuller experience, it's just a case of simply bothering to do that... As for being 'fans' and being negative about this project being selfish, that's a daft viewpoint to have, as criticism is part and parcel of the whole game, and quite often it is the fans who will notice things that are wrong (some are worse than others, Disney fans for example, they complain about carpet corners being turned up)... I would say most of us have a decent understanding of how well the park can run and operate, and a few on here know this from working at parks and seeing what certain attributes of a park's operational standard can cause issues with... There's nothing wrong with fans of anything being critical of something that they like which is doing something (in their opinion) wrong... With this scheme, the park needed as pluk said to test this in combination with a normal queue... Forcing a trial scheme upon everyone is a daft idea indeed, especially if the idea is to phase out the original concept... Hence why the London buses have been taking contactless cards for ages, to get people used to the idea first before eliminating the monetary method... That, a the park needs to improve the non-ride offerings available, which it's been failing at ever since they got rid of the farm quite frankly...

This... It wasn't very good 7 years ago, I doubt age has treated it particularly well... Besides, they already tried to make it popular again by turning trains backwards, and of course when you consider the other coasters in the park (and the probably superior woodie across the ways from it), it's lifespan was marked... It'll be a RMC... Like, there's zero doubt about that... Shame, a duelling GCI would be fab <3

Horray for California Screamin' love, it is a rather under-rated ride, whilst not perfect, it does fulfil the good old fashioned Disney fun criteria... Need to go back, it's changed so much since my visit (Toy Story was being built)...

Not with a giant B&M in the way... Plus it would probably be viewed as an un-required extra cost from the Merlin big-wigs...

Even Disney couldn't get FastPass+ to work perfectly, that doesn't really provide much hope that a Merlin park can do it better... The idea is to get people to spend more time spending on other things (I.e. merch, food, games, etc), but the issue is more that there isn't that much to do of those things or anything else at Thorpe (as Fred already pointed out)... It's not like at Towers were you could spend your time between rides walking to said ride, or indeed spend time in the Gardens, or find a sit-down restaurant, or ride one of the many rides that never gets a queue... Even Chessie has the zoo to wander around to waste time between rides... That's more the issue tbh, that's there's not a lot for the guests to do in between waiting for the next slot... All it will do at Thorpe is move coaster queues into other ride queues because that's kinda all there is to do at the park...

Excessive hang time is excessive... </3

Fastrack makes tonnes of difference to queue times, it's clearly noticeable how queues deemed 60 minutes at park close reduce several minutes when there's no one Fastrack related coming in... Seen it plenty of times on the likes of Fury and Vampire...

If a park is at a stage where you need Fastrack to enjoy your day surely it's doing something wrong? That especially applies to Port Aventura (because of the queue jumping mostly)...

You did only just miss out on the cred in Amsterdam... They'll put in the drop towers soon enough...

I especially like the fact that what they've billed as a world's first really isn't, as the likes of Paultons and Farup already have seats that tilt...

On RCDB it reckons Flying Fish can get 1'000, or Explorer at Mirabilandia can get 900... So even researching it gives variable answers... I once again call onto Mark9 to give us a true answer... Thing is, do any of Chessie's rides actually hit these theoretical capacities? That's the question that should be asked here...

There is no way Scorpion Express, Fury or Rattlesnake get those numbers (sure Mark9 will back me up on this)... Vampire got 600-700 pph if I recall on 2 trains, but that was when operations on it weren't god-awful, so who knows what it's meant to get these days...

Or a Mondial Supernova...

Surely Falls still holds the highest throughput on park these days? God this thing needs a refurb, re-route, re-paint, re-everything quite frankly...

I like the idea that if you don't own a smartphone you have to trudge back and forth to kiosks to choose what ride you want to go on next... That sounds like a lot of fun for guests (who obviously will be in the minority, but will still have some poor experiences as a result)...

Well this ain't opening anytime soon then... #worsethansmiler