Coaster

I can't understand why they painted the warehouse bright red! It would have blended in slightly better if they'd painted it the same colour as the themed exterior.

Out of interest has the station been changed back so there is no extra queueing space for the back two rows?

Great to see that The Smiler was popular today, it had a queue time between 90 - 100 mins for most of the day according to several Facebook pages and the queue times website.

This is completely unacceptable, the park was scheduled to be fully open last weekend; I'm not sure what is going on at Brean but this has never been an issue in the past (as far as I can remember). The new owner seems to have a very slack attitude regarding the way the park operates which is a shame, as it has been a good place to visit in the past.

New queueline for Bobsleigh; https://www.facebook.com/oakwoodthemepk/?fref=ts

At this current time, all we can go by is looking at past attractions. Saw Alive and Nemesis Sub Terra were both failures because the staffing cost of the actors was too high, and the demand for the attractions was declining. Whilst I'm not going to write off Derren Brown's Ghost Train at this stage, I can understand why people (myself included) have concerns about its longevity - which as an investment of over £30 million, will have a catastrophic effect on the park if it gets to the stage where the demand isn't high enough to warrant the costs of paying the staff. Hopefully the use of actors will be minimal - maybe just themed hosts similar to Phalanx on N:ST (therefore not using any extra staff other than those who would be operating the attraction anyway).

So now we have shipping container shops, shipping container hotels, shipping container mazes and shipping container retail units. Maybe Derren Brown's Ghost Train will be the world's first shipping container transit system?!

Yes, they said something along the lines of "The Swarm, Colossus and Rush will join the lineup on Thursday 17th March."

In fairness they may have got the idea of sharing the TLC from Alton but I expect that the decision to make improvements to their rides would have been made way before Towers Loving Care. They've also been sharing old photos of rides and some (very easy) guess the coaster track style questions. I don't have many complaints about Oakwood's social media pages, at least they're posting something which is more than can be said for some parks!

Good to see Oakwood making some improvements to the appearance of the park, it definitely needed doing. They also posted a picture of this year's park map which shows Megafobia with a gold train; Still no news on "Sleepy Hollow" though so I can only assume that it's not happening again this year?

If The Swarm was the only ride not ready to open, and it wasn't a regular occurrence at the Merlin parks in recent years, then I would be more inclined to accept the "unexpected event" scenario. The issue I have is, being unprepared has become a regular thing for Merlin parks in the last two years. Last year Thorpe and Chessington opened with multiple rides closed, I can't honestly remember if Alton did so can't comment on that. It seems that the same thing is happening this year with Thorpe having several major rides not ready to open, and Chessington not being ready for pass day (several rides closed and a huge amount of breakdowns from what I've heard). Then you have situations like The Big Top still being constructed on the day of the preview event at Fright Nights last year, has that happened before? My point is that there is clearly an underlying issue with the park(s), and it needs to be addressed as the current state of affairs is poor. I agree with your point about them informing people, it is good that they have the decency to tell people about the closures - although I have just been on the website and there is nothing on the scrolling banner.

It's difficult to judge the soundtrack on just that section, and also before you hear it in context, but I'm not a fan of it so far. It doesn't really have anything special to it, whereas the previous music had a few fantastic moments of music (unfortunately it was let down by being poor quality computerised sounds). That said, I will reserve judgement until I hear the full track!

I don't consider Fastrack vouchers to be adequate compensation for people who have gone out of their way to visit the park, but I do get your point.I had hoped the park (or Merlin depending on who it comes down to) would have tried to overcome the early-season ride availability issues of last year, but it seems that things have got worse with two major coasters down.

I know that, the comment about it being unacceptable isn't in response to anyone on here, it's just a comment on how standards of what the park sees as acceptable have seemingly slipped in the last two years.

When did it become acceptable for the park to not be ready on opening day? Breakdowns and rides opening late on opening day is expected, but to have two major coasters and a support flat closed alongside a high-throughput water ride (closed all year) when the park is supposed to be fully open to the paying public is not good. I'm sure these issues have increased in the last two years - I don't remember there being major coasters down for opening day in the past few years (2015 excluded), but maybe they were?

Would it not be a better idea to invest in attractions that will serve the park well for years? I just can't see the sense of investing in so many short-term additions (Sub Terra, Saw Alive, IAC etc...) which all fizzle out after a few years when they could invest the same amount of money into an attraction that will last for years, for example a dark ride on the scale of Sub Terra, but one that doesn't rely on so many staff.

Is having a staff member per row really sustainable over a number of years? When the initial rush of people going to try it ends, I can see it being yet another staff-heavy attraction that ends up costing the park too much money. Part of me thinks they would have done better to spend the money on keeping everything else open, but we shall see.

Going by that review it sounds like it could seriously affect throughputs, which isn't good.

Blackpool could easily be the best park in the UK if they wanted to be, but these days they are happy to be led by other parks, which is a shame. I get the joke though and in fairness BPB is still my favourite park.

That soundtrack is just fantastic, why anyone would remove that in favour of a TV show intro theme is beyond me.

Having I'm a Celebrity music on Inferno is complete nonsense, it's a major roller coaster with a volcano theme that has nothing to do with the IAC maze. Inferno has a fantastic theme of its own which used to create such a fantastic atmosphere in the area, I cannot understand why they don't use it anymore.

It's just a shame that throughput wasn't one of the improvements - not sure what could realistically be changed but I think that designing a permanent attraction with a throughput of less than 200pph was a very bizarre decision from the park.

I'd prefer no Rita if it meant we got a decent coaster instead!

It's a shame that idiots like that visit theme parks, I'm sorry to put it bluntly but people who take that sort of attitude towards others don't deserve anything nicer. If anything like that happens again I would definitely recommend telling staff/security. I had a similar incident last year where two people started throwing insults at me and the people I was with, trying to open our rucksacks etc... all because we were "walking too slowly" in the Saw queue (despite the fact that anyone with a brain would be able to work out that we were going to join the back of a queue anyway so there's no point in rushing!) I spoke to the staff at the baggage hold and they called security and the two people were marched off the park. With that said, it's probably not as easy in the situation today as they had already walked off.

Really hope that's a mistake!