TPJames

The smiler incident was absolutely devastating and of course I feel so much sympathy for those involved. If it hadn't been such a life changing event then it wouldn't have had as much effect on the parks as it has done.It's ovbiously upsetting that this event has had such an impact on the theme park community as a whole, as it's likely to drop attendance dramatically all over the UK. However, at the same time I can only feel that this event is beneficial for merlin as a company to learn from this traumatic experience. Not only do merlin now know how to handle a situation like this if it were ever to arise again, however the drop in gate figures across the board may make merlin realise that they need to improve the way they operate their parks if they want to retain their customers. Of course I and I'm sure everyone would have rather the incident never happened however now that it has happened I feel like Merlin can learn from it to improve as a company(whether they actually will is an entirely different matter altogether).

Is it just me or does thorpe seem to be a lot quieter this summer than in previous years? Usually around this period of time all the rollercoasters are hitting 2hours+ and flat rides are reaching 45-60minutes. In the past two years I've visited at the end of August it's been absolutely rammed but this year most queues are staying under 60minutes and those which are gaining over an hour appear to be on reduced capacity. I wonder if gate figures will drop this year as even though there have been a few extremely busy periods this year, it seems a lot quieter overall as a whole. Maybe this is due to the amount of downtime rides are having, the smiler incident, or the fact that I'm a celebrity wasn't a big enough draw to get guests to return. It will be interesting to see how Merlin move forward from this point as all of their parks seem a lot quieter this year than in previous years. Fright nights at thorpe park will also be an interesting one as it will definitely be interesting to see how many people decide to return after the disaster last year. I imagine things will pick up again in 2016 for merlin however it has been an extremely unlucky year for them and they will have lost a lot of money overall.

Yes it's in your opinion, but in no way was the swarm a let down to thorpe park. Yes, maybe it wasn't as successful as Merlin would have liked in it's opening year but the ride only got stronger from there.The ride is one of my favourite rollercoasters, yes it's short. But so what? Look at stealth and oblivion etc. They are also reasonably short and are great rollercoasters. Admittedly I hate the whole backwards gimmick on the swarm but apart from that it is an amazingly fast, fun rollercoaster with some of the best theming out there. The mixture between insane speed and g-force and floaty hangtime on swarm is truly brilliant. Yes, it may not be to your taste, but imagine what thorpe park would be like without it today? It's one of the best and most popular rides there and the standard of the park would be nowhere near it currently is. --- As for the dark ride, I'm just going to wait and see. The likelihood of this attraction is that you are going to go in expecting one thing to happen and something completely different happens. Yes it may be a huge letdown, or it could well be a massive success; but no one is to really know how good or bad the attraction is until they have really experienced it. It's all speculation at the moment but I'd say from the looks of construction, it's looking pretty fine so far.

How samurai can get into your top 10 rides on the settings it runs on is beyond me.Would easily be in your top 3 if you went on a proper funfair topscan... They are absolutely mental I'll tell you that.

Takes you round to the celebrity cyclone(if it's open) it's just a shorter route than going through the maze section.

If you have made or bought any ride models share them in this topic below! I'll get us started; this is my recently constructed KMG Inversion ride model. Made fully out of K'NEX it uses both hand and motor power to provide the most accurate representation of the real ride possible. It took me around a week of hard work to design and construct this scale model! I know we have a fair few fans of Rock Rage on this forum(GladiatorfanKyle, DeanGaryCox to name a couple) so any constructive feedback and comments from anyone on here would be really appreciated so I can take advice for any future ride models I plan to construct.

The fire exit of the attraction leads onto the exit path of Nemesis Inferno which then leads into the shop. There's no gate or anything stopping you walking in, so on summer nights a whole big group of us found ourselves in IAC on trying to exit Ninferno? If you don't know what the exit looks like, it's as dull as it possibly could be. Literally black walls that's it. I'm surprised the slide is gone completely but I can only imagine this is due to the fact pretty much everyone was getting stuck in it...!

My favourite three soft drinks are all Austrian! Almdudler Mezzo Mix Fanta Shokata (It's blue so I call it Fanta Blue...) Such a shame that they all have about half of your daily sugar allowance!

I think apart from Nemesis Inferno and Saw, all the rollercoasters have been operating reduced capacity more times than operating full capacity so far this season. Every time I've visited the park this season Colossus, Stealth and The Swarm have all been operating 1 train only. I've only once visited the park when X has been operating 3 trains and all other times it's only been operating 2. I hate to moan about these things as I know rides are so technically advanced however to have such a bad ride reliability and operations record throughout a season is truly awful. So many parks across the world are able to open their rides and operate full capacity to minimise queue times yet Thorpe Park always struggle to open all their rides let alone operate them on maximum capacity.

Classic

That's because a lot of the parks on queue-times.com are owned by Merlin or Disney...Merlin parks are known by enthusiasts for the worst reliability and that's why I tend to not choose parks like Heide Park or Gardaland for a holiday as it is expected for a significant portion of rides to be closed or on a reduced capacity. Disney parks operate all year round therefore closures are to be expected due to maintenance having to take place during the season as the parks do not have a holiday like most European parks do. It may also be worth nothing that Portaventura and a couple of other parks on queue-times.com display inaccurate queue times or do not work at all(for instance Portaventura hasn't been updated for months and the rides displayed as "closed" are actually open). On my recent trips to parks as holidays; Europa Park, Portaventura etc., all rides were open despite some suffering breakdowns in the day. I understand breakdowns are common things at theme parks and technical difficulties are to be expected however 3-4 rides closed throughout the day or broken down at any one time should be an uncommon thing and has never happened at any park I've been to or heard about except for a standard Merlin Park.

Hmm like the rest of the park..?

Doesn't solve the fact that the problem has been around for weeks now.Also, when using your return ticket operations and rides available will be just as awful on your previous visit. It's no different to offering fastrack, trying to cover up the problem temporarily doesn't resolve it! The park are all talk and no action. They need to sort themselves out, it just shows me that there is next to no point in renewing my annual pass anymore.

To be honest the park is an absolute joke at the moment.

When I went for Rizzle Kicks at "Island Beats" pop music was playing over every single ride from about 4pm except Saw, Nemesis Inferno and The Swarm. Was awfully odd to be standing in the Slammer queueline hearing the likes of Ed Sheeran and Duke Dumont blasting out of both the slammer and Colossus queueline/ride speakers.

As I do not know, how long does it take for planning permission to be submitted and accepted by the council before construction can begin? If we're talking a fair amount of time, could we potentially be seeing a magical month of May opening? If the attraction is indeed located next to PH, this will result in the smaller trampolines, bungee trampolines and the rock climbing wall being taken down. The hot dog stand potentially will be removed as well. This doesn't leave an awful lot of room for an attraction, so unless chessington truly surprise us, I am expecting a small children or family flat ride. A small scale ride is likely due to chessington wasting even more money on accommodation by setting up glamping and high ropes whilst abandoning their park. A large scale ride has been overdue since we go back to Dragons Fury. --- The idea of Samurai isn't a bad one either, I know the reliability would be as useless at chessington as it is at thorpe but the cycles it currently operates on are much more suited for the target market at chessington opposed to thorpe(they could even turn it down another notch if needs be). However, this is the most unlikely thing to happen and in all honesty samurai just needs scrapping altogether.

The only benefit of having a pass these days are for the preview nights. The FN preview night last year was extremely good(bar the horrendous wait for S13) and the IAC preview night this year was great fun with minimal waiting times. Apart from that there is no point having a pass anymore as to attend any special events there is always an event fee which is extremely annoying(£10 for fright nights is particularly excessive) and attending on a day-to-day basis doesn't seem worthwhile anymore as queues are always a nightmare on park due to the amount of broken/closed rides and those which are open are short staffed or operating on low capacity. I know the pass isn't particularly expensive at the outset however it does add up after all the event costs here and there which you are having to pay. The fact that RNR has been incorporated for the whole of fright nights like last year will not end well and also means there is less incentive to pay a £10 event fee to experience mazes with 7 hour waits(5hours virtually followed by 2 hours standby). Even if RNR is operating on the coasters it will still have a bad effect on the mazes as it means there will be an increased capacity standing in maze queuelines resulting in larger queues of 3-4hours+.

Ah sorry, my misunderstanding completely.

I'm no expert but from following the park and maintenance on slammer, it is an extremely rare and complicated ride, therefore maintenace on the ride is likely to be particularly difficult. Combined with the fact that Thorpe Park are lacking in engineers, as shown by the lack of rides open at the beginning of the season and the amount of rides closed in general, it is likely to be due to an engineering and maintenance delay that slammer wasn't ready for the beginning of the season. Maintenace also is likely to take longer on a one of a kind and complicated ride.In an ideal world slammer should be ready for the beginning of the season and I'm confident that the park do strive to try and get all rides maintained and running as early as possible. Winter maintenance wouldn't be carried out late on a ride due to lack of demand. It's as simple as that. On the plus side, once slammer does get up and running it seems to be pretty reliable and it runs on good settings as well. That's why it's the far superior asset to thorpe park than samurai which is constantly down and when it is rarely open, runs on the dullest settings I have ever seen a topscan operate.

Since when? Every time I go to thorpe the majority of the queue times are at least 20-30mins off, whether that be 30 mins longer or 30 mins shorter they are practically always inaccurate. It is rare to find a queue time which is even roughly accurate at thorpe park. Chessington's boards always seem to be inaccurate too, but that seems to be because they never update them there. What I don't understand is how on my trips to both Alton Towers and Europa Park, queue times were always accurate to a degree of about 5-10mins max and yet somehow thorpe park doesn't manage to get queue times nearly accurate at all. It's a problem which has been around for ages and desperately needs sorting, I think their operations team need to be given a lesson from other parks on how to note accurate queue times or an alternative system should be used to provide the most accurate queue time possible.

Turnstiles to note the amount of people in the queueline and therefore caclulate a queuetime is the perfect system for a theme park like thorpe park to incorporate, as it can provide an accurate queue time by a simple calculation and therefore it is easy to track the amount of people in the queue at any one time and speedily update the board to an accurate queue time. Unfortunately, the problem arises when you get some hooligans who spin the turnstiles as many times as they can and mess up the system entirely.

Completely unrelated post to the above here... But on the plans there looks to be at least 5? queueline entrances? Could we be talking Main Entrance, Fastrack Entrance, Reserve N Ride Entrance, Disabled Entrance and Single Rider Entrance?

Is an annual pass discount applicable for this outlet?

Like Samurai, Vortex is now sharing a single rider queue with the fastrack queueline. I unfortunately didn't notice if any other rides are adopting the same policy. This can be only be a good sign for the park and hopefully means that one by one, each ride will gain a dedicated single rider queueline to increase throughput.

Pretty much all the queue time boards were inaccurate throughout the whole afternoon and evening, but that's Thorpe Park for you isn't it.... I found it very odd that Colossus was displaying 30mins at 6:30pm and when we came out of the concert, it was then displaying 50mins. I was in doubt that either of those queue times were actually accurate, as by 6:30pm, pretty much every single ride on park was 5minutes wait. Although second trains on rides were not absolutely necessary during the evening, I found it very odd how they removed trains after 6pm on the big rollercoasters. Whilst I did not encounter this myself, it must be very annoying to have to wait an extra 10-20mins at a rollercoaster because they are reducing the throughput. I believe X and Saw did not remove any cars though after 6pm. The concert itself was shorter than I was expecting as I was expecting it to go on for about 90minutes but it only ended up lasting 50-60minutes. We entered the performance area about 7:30pm for it to start at about 7:45pm and it must have ended between 8:35-8:45pm. Was certainly expecting it to go on till about 9pm however it wasn't a problem for us as it meant we were able to get a few more rides in. I think the fact that Rizzle Kicks haven't been performing lately(they now don't have another 'major' gig until 2016) combined with the fact that they haven't been creating any new tracks may have meant that they ran out of songs quicker than the other acts. However, I must say the atmosphere and vibe during their concert was much better than expected and their tunes did put everyone in a really lively mood.