Project LC

The situation is entirely caused by management loosing sight of how theme parks make money. The gate fee covers the running costs, the spend in the park makes the money. Management decided to start contracting things out and cutting on maintenance so short term spend looked good. Unfortunately this meant Merlin earns less per head as another company is skimming off the top and guests spend less when unhappy. They lost sight of the absolute basics and now there is very little room for course correction.

Merlin entertainments credit rating has been downgraded by S&P due to its growing debts and cash outflow with declining revenues. "Persistent high cash burn could lead to insufficient liquidity after 12 months, without further cash injection" All in all thats a pretty poor outlook and it does make me wonder what it means for future investments at the parks.

The curse is that for every ride that six flags closes, a member of the accelerator family will suffer downtime.

There is always Saw. If Merlins approach becomes cost cutting everywhere IPs may be moved to the chopping block.

Just for clarification the SDO has been formally submitted. They usually outline the visual strategy and environmental strategy and give an indication of what they want to build. With an SDO granted they wouldn't need to submit typical planning permission documents. So its possible we will never get to see detailed plans until development is well under way. Getting the Eurostar to Bedford would be an immense challenge due to differences in signalling systems. Not only that but route availability on that line is basically non existent. The guest split mentioned in the SDO is rather interesting with the first year expected to be 70% domestic and 30% international at a total of 8.5m with that changing to a 50:50 split in subsequent years woth 11.5m guests. Seems a bit of the high side but I do suspect those are marketing figures and not commercial targets.

I find it interesting that the special development order has stated a potential ride height of 377ft. They also seem keen to focus on high thrills so I wonder if Thorpe will be more affected than first envisioned.

A cranes price is entirely dependent on its weight. The video isnt clear enough to tell its weight but from experience it looks like its anywhere between 60-120tons. They would have contacted a crane firm for the day hire but it being last minute and London area id have a guess of about £600-£2000.

There is certainly a potential for it running too fast if you do add weight to the trains. There will be all sorts of assumptions in the design and safety factors. It depends how conservative they were during design to determine how much weight they could safely add. I think the most realistic solution is to ensure that trains have x amount of guests when dispatching and to provide an easy evacuation plan for when it does inevitably stall with passengers.

The easiest engineering solution is to add some permanent weights evenly across the trains. Although that would require design checks to see if the structure and trains can deal with the increased forces. It would also increase wear. In the meantime the absolute easiest way to ensure weight is on the trains and spread out without going over the design maximum is fill the train with people. Installing LSMs would be very expensive, mostly getting the power over there and you would basically require new trains. It wouldn't surprise me if adding LSMs comes to a similar cost of reprofiling the outerbank.

It sure is looking bleak at Merlin. Decades of underinvestment has lead to a build up of issues that now require large capital investment to resolve. Their approach to this unfortunately has been massively let down by poor strategic decisions. Nemesis reborn was never going to get its return. To the general public its just the same ride with a new name. Thats not going to encourage new people in. Hyperia was marketed terribly. Which is a historic recurring issue across the parks. They always poorly communicate what they are selling. Exaggerated CGI models and a never ending list of strange worlds firsts combined with no call to action in the adverts will always fall flat. They need to use actual ride footage from drones and on ride footage. Combine that with word of mouth from a good ride and I think their return on investment would be vastly improved. I don't follow Chessington closely enough to comment on the world of Jumanji. But it comes as no surprise to me that todays news is that Merlin is looking to sell off a few of the sealife aquariums so they can "focus on investment in its biggest international sites". Years ago Merlin decided to focus on midway over the parks. A heavily saturated market where their USP is far weaker. Its also an area where repeat visits are far lower. They focused on the wrong side of the business for growth. Fortunately their new private equity owners are cutting the dead weight and focusing the business towards a product thats intrinsically difficult to compete with. I just hope they can turn it around before the years of underinvestment becomes unsalvageable.

My concern with an RMC or multi launch is thorpe park typically chooses to restrict themselves in coaster length. Hyperia is rather short for its height and it makes me think that Merlin is still keen to keep coaster length to a minimum. It saves costs on steel and on needing an extra train but I do think it leaves the rider feeling short changed. I can see stealth being lined up for removal given sky high energy costs and the slow demise of the hydraulic launch. If they replaced it with a multi launch then perhaps I could stomach the loss.

It is very disappointing it wasnt given a proper send off. Long live the king. There is now an absolutely massive space left behind. The world record launch coaster coming in 2026 to replace it will have to be one hell of a ride to make up for that loss. Hopefully it doesn't turn out to be the tower coaster being asked about in surveys a while back.

I did caveat that with "may". I'm pretty sure this ride has been rushed in to distract from TT2 and if anything I think it indicates even 2025 may be missed. Siren was originally meant to be coming to six flags Mexico, which itself was originally meant to open as cliffhanger in energylandia.

Its looking like Cedar Point may have 2 new rides opening in 2025 with top thrill 2 and another new coaster, as they have just announced Sirens curse which is a Vekoma Tilt track. Have to say I wasn't expecting a vekoma tilt track to be on the cards.

Rumours are confirmed to be a LSM launch with a 420ft spike being added. The ride will launch forward, roll back and launched up the spike before being launched forward again up and over the top hat. The ride will have new trains, worryingly only 3 trains of 20 riders. I sure hope the trains aren't like icebreakers at SeaWorld as they were some of the most uncomfortable trains ive ever been on.