JohnD

It probably opened on 1 train, though looking at the current queue times I suspect everything is now on full capacity. We can't really learn very much from how well RnR is performing this week. Currently queues for most rides are around 15 minutes so the system seems a little unnecessary. I want to know what happens when there's 15000+ people in the park and queues for coasters would be 90+ minutes without RnR. Will we see 75 minutes for the likes of Rush and Samurai or will people not wait that long? Will the paths be packed with people just wandering around as the RnR allocations have gone and standby queues are enormous? The real test for this system would be the busiest day of the year.

They shouldn't offer front row when the fastrack entrances are closed as it adversely affects the main queue too much. If (say) Colossus is on 1 train then it doesn't take many VIP passholders asking for front to completely ruin the front row queue for everyone else. Looking at the T&Cs it also states that Scarefest mazes are excluded, but there's no mention of Fright Nights mazes which gets worse queues anyway.

It's potentially a lot more than a £100k increase on last year, as anybody who doesn't renew means another pass is available for a new customer, each of which is an extra £200 to Merlin compared to last year. As it's £95 for platinum fastrack at Towers the VIP price last year was far too low for what they were offering, they're now going some way to addressing that. People will pay almost ANYTHING for fastrack, and it seems Merlin are only just starting to realise this.

It's a premium product and should be priced accordingly - if they sell out, it's too cheap.

A 90 minute queue isn't necessarily an indicator of a problem - on very busy days major rides will get long queues at any park. Europa Park has very efficient operations yet some queues can reach triple figures, but the difference is there are other rides that you can almost guarantee will have little to no queue, and queues will generally be appropriate for the scale of the attraction. Rides at Chessington get completely disproportionate queues. The fact that Vampire is hitting 90 minutes isn't really the biggest issue for me, it's the fact that things like Monkey Swinger, Black Buccaneer, Seastorm and Tuk Tuk Turmoil can get to 45min or more. Bubbleworks, Tomb Blaster, Skyway and even Tiny Truckers can be an hour. None of these rides are worth anything even approaching that.

It rather annoys me that year after year Chessington seems to plod along without ever really investing very much in new rides and yet attendance never seems to suffer for it. I want UK parks to be the best they can be, but why should Chessington bother if people still come even if the park isn't really trying? Meanwhile a lot of smaller parks are struggling along, even though you'd be likely to have a better day out at any number of them due to the lack of queues.

It's only one letter out, it should just be "OW". Though if it wasn't rough it'd be unforgivably bland.

Back to Bubbleworks, any word on whether it's back to full capacity yet? Surely topping the ride up with water shouldn't take too long?

People still having their bags when boarding slows things down more than you might think - just look at how crowded the exit platform gets on Colossus for example. Equally, if it didn't have a bag room Smiler's throughput would be absolutely appalling. I don't think there's any way you could retro-fit a satisfactory system to Vampire as there's nowhere suitable for a bag drop room and automated carousels like on Raptor/Desert Race only really work when onload and offload are on the same side. It would be good to see Vampire back on 3 trains (I miss seeing 2 trains passing overhead), but in order for it to be effective they will have to reduce loading times significantly. If they're stacking when running 2 then adding a 3rd is utterly pointless.

Can't believe I forgot Helix... 60+ mph is significantly faster than I was expecting given what we've seen of the layout so far, I was thinking along the lines of mid 40s

If the claim of Europe's fastest multi-launch coaster is correct we're talking speeds of at least 53mph to beat Juvelen. If this turns out to be anything like that then we're in for a treat.

Thorpe has always had poor reliability, in about 10 visits between 2007-09 I only had one day with all rides open. I think there were only 27 days without at least one ride closed in the entire 2007 season. Things got a little better for a while, but I don't think their maintenance team has ever really had sufficient resources to cope with the number of problematic rides they have. The result is frequent downtime and the inability to get all rides open on full capacity. Keeping rides on 1 train despite long queues is another issue entirely, and is absolutely infuriating. I'm yet to visit Thorpe this season, but I'm not really enthusiastic about getting there if there's going to be several rides closed and long queues on the coasters, regardless of what day I visit.

I've not been on Rameses for about 2 years, but that video has reminded me of why I don't really like it (despite being a fan of Ripsaw). It spends too long doing not very much and then holds you upside down uncomfortably long. I'd probably prefer it if they just ran the 2nd cycle.

Oh wow that sound absolutely horrible. I'll stick to the edge seats for a bit, I'm not into waterboarding.

Shambhala may be overrated, but it's way better than both Nitro and Millennium Forceless

So the daily capacity of this thing, after discounting disabled/fastrack, is around 1000 people. Oh dear.

The first time I rode was early in the morning, about the 3rd or 4th train of the day. It was OK, bounced a bit but not too bad. As nothing else was open at this point I went round again and it was absolutely appalling. Trouble is, even if it wasn't incredibly unpleasant to ride, I still don't think I'd rate it as the layout is unbelievably bland - even more so than Rita. It's just fast and, as with PMBO and Millennium Force, I'm not a fan of rides that rely purely on speed without any dynamics.

That works out as 80 seconds between trains on average, so my guess was spot on

It'll be around 80 seconds between trains when running absolutely flat out, possibly even slightly less. It might be theoretically possible to run even faster, but that's about the best I've seen it do and there didn't seem to be much room for improvement. Swarm is probably one of the easiest coasters in the park to hit max capacity on due to the large number of staff, 2 across seating with plenty of space for guest circulation and no bag storage issues.

Are parks in this country really so poor that people think queueing an hour for Monkey Swinger is in any way acceptable? It baffles me that a park can be so mediocre for so long and yet it seems to have no impact on visitor numbers.

Surely Tomb can't get anywhere near 1000/hour? I've never tried to work it out, but whenever I've been there the queue has moved at a snails pace and the loading seems to take ages.

Chessington has long suffered with disproportionately long queues for mediocre attractions. According to queue-times.com there are currently 5 rides with a queue of an hour or more: Kobra, Fury, Rattlesnake, Bubbleworks and Zufari, with a further 7 queues between 45 and 60 minutes. Fury aside, it's hard to justify waiting more than about 30 minutes for any of these rides. The loss of vampire isn't helping, but the underlying issues have been apparent for some time - they just don't have enough high capacity rides for the number of guests they get.

Good idea, but the use of 3 letter abbreviations mean you have to be fairly familiar with the park to work out what everything is. It also means Storm in a Teacup and Storm Surge have the same 3 letter code, though Storm Surge gets such long queues it's not too hard to work out which is which! On the main site there are a few issues with some of the parks too - the various Seaworld & Busch parks include things like shops, lockers and toilets, which makes it harder to find the useful data. The Epcot list would benefit from a reduction in-ride attractions too.

RC racer is more akin to Rush than Kobra (in ride experience if not appearance). It's much faster than Kokra, the seats don't spin and it's all over far too soon!

In which case all the talk of not having spares is total nonsense.