SteveJ

He's clearly at the top of the map, just download da whole thing! Still it doesn't mean Chessington have invented a time machine to bring back Prof Burp's BubbleWorks, in case you were wondering.

They are almost certainly riffing on the 'app' culture with simplified text, tabs and filtered images. The back of the park map looks almost like a website. I think they have chosen the bland/easy option but at least they have thought more about how young people communicate and receive information these days.

Instead of logos and colourful graphics to represent the rides, we now have meaningless statistics and white text. Why? The rollercoasters have been reduced to wavey lines floating on some 2D shapes with no depiction of the themes or brands. I have no idea why they have done this.

Blimey! Usually I don't care about the accuracy of maps but this new design looks thoughtless. Rides are in the wrong place, everything other than the rollercoasters are tiny or covered up, and some rides are missing entirely. Everything is pushed into the centre with a blue void taking up 50% of the space. Those graphics and fonts are generic to the extreme. Merlin have always been experts at brand identity, but this year Thorpe Park has seemingly no grip on what it wants to be. Pretty strange!

It's pretty shocking! Shows how Chessington weren't afraid to push the boat out in the 90s. I have this weird memory of it being extremely prominent throughout the area (not necessarily clear but certainly loud) around 2004/5. I remember hanging around the Vampire entrance a couple of times and it being unbearable after a few minutes. In a good way. I didn't notice it as much after that and forgot about it until recently, I guess they turned it right down after the audio was all changed around Transylvania in 2006 (blame the BubbleWorks refurbishment).

Ahem. I remember it absolutely terrifying me. It was played extremely loudly out of one or two small speakers behind the waterfall. Those horrific screams could be heard very clearly from the Vampire queue. As you can imagine, the ride had much less of an atmosphere once the track was removed, although I can certainly understand why it was stopped! If you manage to listen to the whole 23 minutes, congratulations on your achievement and I sympathise with your new mental health issues.

Transylvania is completely closed off at the moment.

You would remember! You'll soon find the reason why nobody likes the sponsorship. I can't imagine what Chessington is like for anybody who didn't ride the original BubbleWorks. A video could never convey the whole experience; the scents, the colours and the feeling are all lost to time.

Construction is hurrying along and I'm really warming to Scorpion Express. The old design was better by far, and you are all going to be disappointed and moan about it constantly, but who cares? It will have a lot more life in it from now on. Flying Fish will still be an inferior experience.

There'll be plenty of new steel poles around Forbidden Kingdom to make up for loss of that scaffolding! Apart from that, most rides and attractions are looking brilliant this year.

But that was taken the same day as all their other photos (last sunday), so nothing we don't already know?

Thanks a lot for this opportunity, personally I'll be doing all I can to get there! Sounds like a nice breezy day out... Are the tickets limited?

You are right, but won't have much hope convincing people that on an internet forum! I will always prefer the original design simply because it was infinitely more substantial than whatever is being created now. It seemed back then that even the simplest rides could become extravagant and charming without all the limitations imposed by marketing and budgeting that cause so many ideas to struggle in UK theme parks today. The Runaway (Mine)Train always was a boring figure-of-eight Mack powered coaster with a commonplace theme, and I can't forget how aesthetically shocking it had looked for the last decade. However, with its clever scenic queueline taking you around the whole of Calamity Canyon and the rocky tunnels disguising the actual size of the coaster, it showed a genuine will to make sure the rider had as much fun as possible. (I'm not sure squirting water in riders faces does not show the same kind of showmanship!)

Sorry for some reason I wrote "yesterday" instead of "last season", a bit misleading! It seems my fingers weren't connected to my brain. But yes, Rattlesnake received most of the maintenance attention last year, along with Tomb Blaster. It still looks quite shabby but hopefully the effects that went missing last year will have been fixed by now.

Well it must be quite high on their priorities because they spent loads of money on it yesterday, removed half the scenery for refurbishment and repainted a lot of props. Plus as far as I know Rattlesnake is not themed as a run down, crumbling attraction with mossy animatronics and patched up fibreglass. The notion that leaving rides to fall apart "fits the theme" is silly in any situation, and thankfully that's really not what Chessington are trying to do.

Ironic that those steel girders holding up a 2D background are far more robust than the scaffold-thing that held up the big mine caves for 26 years! I'll miss the old Runaway Train, if mostly for the ability for the operator to interact with the riders so much. I'm assuming that flexibility will be gone now the ride has been refurbished so thoroughly, with prerecorded announcements and such probably coming next year. I've also heard murmurs (that I hope aren't true) about the ride getting some kind of pre show, which could rule out the extra circuits you'd get on off-peak days!

That will indeed be a water spray, as shown on the promo image. The flame will presumably come from the new oil tower being installed too.

(And the entire show script, audio and effect sequencing!) Here's that very interesting interview with Brad Wynne at Merlin Magic Making, for anybody who hasn't already read it.

The same team that did Nemesis Sub-Terra Mk1 and Zufari then. I see.

I didnt realised the change when it happened but I remember that now. The voice is barely any different but the little feedback whine instantly takes me back to standing in the Stealth queue in 2006. The familiar new one is slightly longer and doesn't always have time to play the whole way through. It's: "Place your heads back, face forward, hold on tight and brace yourself!" With lots of revving sounds.

That must have been an error on their website because here's the sign that was on park all season announcing the competition. Also until they updated their website at the end of last year that webpage only mentioned DF. Anyway it was me who won the competition and I didn't include anything to do with Runaway Train in my entry! They said it was only a possibility that any of my ideas would be included (which is always the case with such public competitions, leaving it to the professionals is usually best). So really there is no way that they would've delayed Runaway Train all year just to wait for the competition to close, there must have been another internal factor that stopped them.

The competition was for Dragon Falls and the outcome of the competition had no impact the Runaway Train plans. The whole competition thing was run by Chessington's online marketing department, who sent me an email to say they had chosen my entry (which was all Dragon Falls-related) earlier in January. So there's really no connection at all between that and Scorpion Express. The long delay in refurbishing Runaway Train last year seems to suggest they were unsure how to proceed. All last year they had simply said Runaway Train was "closed for refurbishment" with no suggestion of a redesign; instead it was Dragon Falls that would be "rethemed". When the Dragon Falls project got cancelled, only then were Scorpion Express, the hotel and the monkey enclosure announced. To me this shows how Chessington have loads of future plans but just can't get them done in the order they desire. Maybe Merlin prioritised a new hotel over the much-needed ride refurbishments without giving them much choice? Either way, I really hope Scorpion Express won't be another case of ambitious plans getting totally lost in translation as a result of confused planning schedules and budget changes...

What was wrong with it out of interest? I imagine it will be up to standards when the main season starts. Rides are often poorly presented in February events because most of the staff haven't been employed yet. Most of the cleaning/fixing gets done in March I think.

Ironic, considering when X No Way Out opened it had onboard audio on every car (although the speakers were tiny). It would have been a good idea.

Once upon a time, there was a rusty old mine train called the Scorpion Express that ran around a cactus, then it did it again... The end? That's not really a storyline, it's just a premise for the theme. I wonder what Tomb Blaster's would be, considering nothing changes between the beginning or end of the ride, it's just a shooting game in a tomb. We currently have no idea how much of the ride's marketing will be translated into the finished product. The premise sounds nice and colourful (although basically the same as it was before), but it might end up just as a rollercoaster on some concrete. Or it might not!