Project LC

How long did you wait for rush? I struggle to believe that I am the only one seeing this massive massive problem with the system. You cant just make the 5000 to 10,000 people go else where when they are in a THEME PARK! Thorpe park is a THEME PARK NOT A SHOPPING CENTRE. What do they think will happen to that lot if you close the main queue, they wont suddenly stop existing. If anyone at Thorpe can answer where do those people go from ride host to the creator of this stupid system themselves it would be greatly appreciated. On a side note does anyone have merlin entertainments complaint email place because ive had enough of this stupid idea. You would think having an annual pass since 2005 would get you some sort of value but apparently not. The entire idea of RnR is a stupid gimmick which doesn't solve anything at all. You have 15,000 people in the park either have a large majority in the high throughput rides or offload them all to low throughput flats. Great idea Thorpe, truly an original idea of ignoring physics and thinking that your park can be queue less. Look at all the other massive theme parks which are already doing this where it works so well, oh wait none of them are! Disney tried and failed. Cedar fair and six flags never tried because they know it is impossible. Merlin know its impossible and wont work hence why its being done to Thorpe and not its flagship park of Alton. In case you cant tell the entire idea makes me very very angry and I highly doubt I'm the only one. Yes at least they are trying. WRONG. Any normal park would have seen queues were getting bad and invested in high throughput flats to bring down the queues. Instead they buy stormsurge and redecorated a thearter. So to combat the problem you develop a system which will never work because the throughput of the entire park is still the same. It has a fixed number of people it can deal with and until that rises Thorpe park will be forever plagued with its queues. Go ahead and argue with what ever point you like but my mind is fixed on this entire stupid gimmicky waste of time and money system known as Reserve and ride.

Still no one has been able to answer where do the people go. The 5000 people wont just disappear, they are at a theme park to ride rides. Queues get moved to lower throughput rides which makes the whole situation so much worse. So when the flats get introduced to the system and you have 15,000 people with no rides at all to queue for what happens then? I asked Thorpe park and they couldn't give me an answer (it was guest services so they may not know but the point still stands).

I more made the comparison of exact counting not the numbers of which they sell. Cedar point was literally counting 5 of fastlane then 20 of the main queue. That worked quite well as it didnt seem random and didnt have massive increases of fastlane all of a sudden. I also applaud Thorpe in trying however I seriously doubt it will work.

There is nothing from stopping people from queuing normally and reserve and ride at the same time. Surely if people had any sense at all that is what they would do.

Unfortunately Thorpe have very little choice in having the 3rd standby queue. If you remove that then you have 5000+ people with nowhere to go. flat rides will get flooded with people and the paths will become really crowded. No one will want to wait 2 hours for a flat ride so you end up with a lot of guests which are either left with nothing to do or very angry in a queue they don't want to be in. You can not have 15000 people in a park and expect the coasters to have no queues, it really is insanity. The ratios for fastrack are pretty much the same for each ride its just the number of people that are in that ratio is less.

They have increased the fastrack ratio. if you count the number of fastrack to main queue its about 8-10 fastracks for every 20 people from the main queue. Instead of what used to be around 5-7. However saying that there was a point of Thursday where the main queue didn't move because only fastrack were being let on. by the sounds of things that is what has been happening today but with RnR, If there is set ratios then the people controlling the queues should be told them so they can let the correct amount of people through just like cedar point and six flags. However I wouldn't be surprised if this system of RnR is using a throughput number that many of the rides can not achieve hence the problems. They are not going to succeed in this RnR system, there is too many things that can change which effects it and the fact the people reserving to ride can go anywhere, for example into another queue. I guess there is one good thing, they can now start selling fastracks for guest services.

A few weeks ago the RnR page displayed the flats as an option to queue and Thorpe parks twitter did mention the plan was to have it on all rides. Also what is the case with queueing normally. It was there for a bit then disappeared again so what is it now?

Anyone want to take bets on when the system will crash, if it hasnt already. If anyone is there on this section of reserve and ride can you please tell me how it is working becuase they seemed to have changed something as the flats are no longer in the trial. Still very anti the idea though, when I was at six flags they had 36,000 people on park and the queues were similar to what thorpes were on wednesday with only 12,000. If they think RnR is going to fix it they really are stupid.

Yep I was one of the two lads in black cedar point tee shirts. There were also 2 other people in cedar point shirts who were part of the european coaster club. The stealth/ swarm/ dodgems/ tea cups team were made up of a mix of new people. Met them all at the end of the day to retreive the car keys and I recognised a few not all of them. I did also see that my favorite ride operator has been given a promotion to some sort of manager with an ipad. Also on reflection my initial post may have been a bit harsh on them, however I shall still not forgive them about ignoring both of my complaints about queue jumpers. Why have the signs saying you will be evicted from the park if you let them get on the ride with no punishment at all.

Its a B&M giga coaster!!!!!! And an epic one at that. Got some pretty impressive stats: 325ft tall 95 mph. If only thorpe were to get one.

In order: 1. Stealth 2. Swarm 3. Slammer 4. Nemesis inferno 5. Rush (must be swing A) 6. Vortex 7. Colossus 8. Dodgems 9. Saw 10. Samurai

Yes the seagull did die. It flew past the brake run at the wrong time and collided head on with the train.

Havent seen it do that at all. Also when I asked why towards the begging of the season they said it was down to the engineers schedual.

You will not see nemesis start the day with 2 trains, it hasnt all season. I belive the first chance engineers have to add the 2nd train is about 10am as long as another ride hasnt hit some sort of troubble. Stealth and saw did hit 100 minutes in the day. Stealth was at about 4-5pm at 100 which was a little bit after it opened and saw was around 100 at around 2. Also forgot to mention tidal wave was having problems all day where the water down the drop would stop flowing. However they just continued to operate and it leads to a much bigger splash. Apologies if you thought I was coming across as rude but the stealth team really did annoy me. Admitingly I could have worded it better and not been so condesending however I do vist rather often and ive seen many other people do there jobs in different ways of which some would have been far better to use. On a side note I would love to do their job but its too far away for a daily commute.

Yes there may have been a reason in why no one was being batched of which I couldnt see but even then I dont see why the staff on the platform were getting impatient if it was a valid reason to hold the queue up for so long. I do understand what you mean by my time keeping, I will ask the rest of my group tomorrow in how long they throught it was but I would say that it was about 10 minutes for the train to dispatch. (Time wasnt exactly flying by the point, the number of queue jumpers was already making me very angry).

Ok we were down in the queue in on of the extentions next to the dried up pond. We were able to see the station want the air gates. The gates opened to allow the front row queue on and the rest of the station. The 2 people in the front row got on however the other gates didnt have anyone at them so remained empty. After a few minutes the staff on the station started doing hand signals to the queue saying that the person over by the stairs ( the batcher) was being derpy.

I guess the batcher could have been having a conversation with guests about some sort of issue but people in the front got on and the rest of the train remained empty for about 10 minutes until people finally were allowed on the station.

It really was sitting there for about 10 minutes because the batcher to reasons only known to himself wasn't letting people through. It was about 5 past 6 if you want to try and find people to confirm I was telling the truth.

I wont be returning to the park this year, ill go again when there is less people and new staff in march. As for the queues they are not that annoying its when people jump them and then the staff do nothing. Stealth really was a joke. Having an empty train waiting to load for 10 minutes because the staff were not paying attention is not acceptable. A lot of people paid a lot of money to get in and a large cause of the queues inside are idiotic staff.

For the first hour yes, from then on not really. We lost our car keys in the morning on stealth, so we were waiting for park closing to get them back. That wasn't too bad as it was our own fault. However the breakdowns the massive queues the unhelpful and unfriendly staff, the guest who have no respect for anyone but themselves, the vast number of fastrackers. Normally I put up with quite a lot of stuff from Thorpe but this was a step too far. The rides are not as fun as they were and quite frankly I didnt enjoy myself.

Well today they were so strict on queue jumpers nothing at all was done. I also have to agree confronting them is quite fun although confronting a group of 12 young adults was a little bit more than I was willing to take on.

Does anyone know if there is an official complaints email or is it just the customer services. After today ive had enough and they need to know what sort of things they are doing which is just unacceptable.

Today I was at the park and it started off well. However that is one of the only good points of the day. Despite the park opening for first to ride at 9:15 none of the rides where ready. Most didnt open until 9:45. We rode stealth 5 times in a row and then went off to nemesis inferno. As always at that time it was running on 1 train so allowing the queue to build and build. We then went off to rush as a person in our group didnt want to do saw or Colossus as he valued his head. At rush we were greated by someone who cant count to 8 and clearly had no idea how to batch so lots of empty seats were going. The rest of the day was normal until we went to ride stealth again. We reached the 15 minute sign when the ride broke down. The queue was evacuated and priorty passes given out (havent seen that happen in a very long time). After about 2 hours stealth came back to life so we joined the queue and started walking round the queue. At which point some moron opened a gate so he didnt have to walk 20 meters and allowed 30 people infront of us (very angry at that). After a few minutes train one collided with a seagull so we waited for the train to be cleaned which for no reason took about 30 minutes to clean (even more angry at there lack of urgency). Then the batcher decided the main queue didnt exist and only let fastrack and disabled go which filled about 12 trains. Eventually we got to the batcher and told them about the queue jumpers of which nothing was done (this point I was basically fuming). So what should have been walk on turned into 60 minutes. We went away and redeeemed some more priorty passes from a previous time and did a few more rides. Eventually we returned to stealth as its 100 minute queue went down to 50. If I wasnt in a bad enough state already it was about to get a lot worse. After 2 minutes of being in the queue we saw a new set of about 12 friends opening a gate and queue jumping exactly the same way as before. This time one of our group left the queue to alert the staff as we had had enough. Once again nothing was done. Within minutes they were all on the ride. Then if I couldnt already be more mad at the stealth crew we had a 10 minute delay becuase the batcher wasnt paying attention. He let the station become empty and wasnt letting anyone get on. No it was not a fault the operator and the other ride hosts were telling him to get a move on. All in all customer services will be getting a complaint tomorrow morning. Also on another note swarm was broken for an hour in the morning stealth was closed for 2 hours saw was closed for an hour, dodgems opened very late and were closed for about 3 hours and samurai didnt open all day.All coaster were above 60 minutes and rush and vortex were above 50 minutes. Today was a joke and reinforced to me how bad thorpe is. The list of complaints about today goes on but I dont want to spend the next 10 years typing.

The reason they were on one train was something to do with the weather. The near by thunderstorms meant that they had to be ready to shut down pretty quickly. Once the storms had passed they were all back up to full capacity.

So I set off on the 29th of july at a nice and early 2:40am. Due to flight times and numerous delays we didnt get to the park until 8pm local time. So we checked into the hotel and had a nice walk along the beach and a quick look at gatekeeper and windseeker. 30th july Being a hotel guest the park opened at 9am so we had breakfast and walked down to the nearest entrance. There was a 10 minute queue to get in so by the time we got to maverick there was about a 20 minute queue. I had heard very good things of maverick and I can now understand why. It is a fantastic layout and the launch halfway through really packs a punch. After maverick we walked over to millennium force for a 30 minute queue and wow that was worth the wait. I would try and compare it to something in the uk but there is no comparison at all. The first drop is like nothing I have ever been on, it just doesn't end. After that we got off and walked straight onto mantis. Good and fun ride, can be painful if you get the seat wrong. We then walked straight onto iron dragon. Then after that we walked straight onto power tower. At this point we were wondering where everyone was. After a few more rides of walking straight onto we came to gemini. I don't care what anyone has to say, there is not a more uncomfortable ride in the world than gemini. I'm certain it broke 90% of my bones and turned my lungs to dust. After that we did a few more coasters and eventually came to gatekeeper. Thats when we found out where everyone was. Gatekeeper itself only had a 30 minute queue but when the thunder started we then realised where everyone was, at home! We went back to the hotel room and waited for it to pass and then re entered the park and did the remaining rides we hadn't done. All except top thrill dragster when it started to rain again. This is when we called it a day and said we would try again tomorrow. The next day was similar but was slightly longer queues so we did some of the water rides. This is when we found out that thunder canyon is apparently wetter than tidal wave. There was not a singly dry patch on me, so we decided to go to soak city. A nice water park but a little crowded. The following days were very similar with longest queues being 40-60 minutes for TTD. The only exception was the saturday where it rained in the morning so a lot of the rides were on 1 train which meant there was no queue in the park under 2 hours 30 minutes. Top thrill dragster was at an amazing 3 hours 30 minutes. So we decided to leave the park and play on the beach. Apart from that the park had short queues all the time and was an amazing place. I can not fault it. (Ill see if I can add some pics)