Ian-S

We have lots of thunder and lightning over us presently (East Surrey). Let's not forget that lightning can travel up to 7 miles from it's point of origin before grounding, and Thorpe has two massive lightning conductors masquerading as roller coasters within the space of a few hundred meters, so it doesn't need to be thundering at Thorpe for them to close rides. As for rain, I can understand it if the rain is heavy, even water can do damage to flesh if you hit it fast enough, but closing a slow water ride because it's raining, kind of ironic that one lol.

Pre-show = green screen photo box most sensible people will just say no thank you to. Great choice Merlin.

I doubt anybody at Chessington would openly admit to the place having a rat problem.

We saw a rat the size of a rabbit scuttle out of there couple weeks back, wondered if it had eaten any of the residents it was that big lol.

Considering how easy it is to create the mist in the Inferno tunnel you'd think that would be the one effect they could keep running, if it's a dry ice machine and that is the issue, a glyco based mist machine is only a couple hundred quid, send one of the slackies in the office to maplin to pick one up ffs.

Clearing the drainage system would help, when we got a whiff it smelt a lot like one of those fat barges the water board is forever having to clear from the sewers when people pour hot fat down the drains.

Perhaps it's as simple as they forgot to give the go ahead, project manager a thought project manager b was dealing with it, while b thought a was, and they never talked about it? I have seen worse....

I'll try.The day we went through Valhalla(sp?) there was about four or five sections of theming we could see, a section with the three headed dog, some fire, a tunnel and of course the bit where the boat runs backwards, the rest of the ride was pitch black, including two drops. Don't get me wrong, it was a great ride, on the bits I could see, great theming (best I'd been on), and got us very wet, but the dark sections were kind of boring, it's hard to get excited about something you cannot see. It's like the first section of Saw, it's got some great theming in around the drop, but it's so dark you can't actually see it, and if you get to stop next to the puppet on the bike, that's so loud it's so distorted you can in a strange kind of way hardly hear it. My point being it's hard to enjoy something you can't see, OK make it really dark but not dark enough you cannot see your hand in front of your face.

I personally don't understand the fuss over dark rides, I was kinda bored at that water one at Blackpool (see I can't even remember it's awesome sounding name), small seems a bit pointless riding/floating round in pitch black not seeing where you're going.

Assuming they even need to gain permission, when I did a search there was a lot of old stuff granted that was never built, it doesn't take much to extend those conditions, certainly not as much work as putting in a fresh application for a new project.

How much did Shrek cost? The only info I can find said each Shrek attraction would cost in the region of £8Million to build, that's a lot compared to something like The Swarm which IMHO is a far better use of money for a theme park than one of these 'experience' type rides. Perhaps WC16 is another DreamWorks partnered project?

I thought the budget was £3Mil not £30?

My son was really pissed he couldn't get it to spin

LOL I didnt count, they tell you on a display as you exit through the shop how many spins you had and if you get onto the leaderboard you get to put your name to it, the #1 was some mindbending number in the low 90's.

Spent the day at BPB, wow anybody who complains about Colossus being rough has never ridden anything here. Fun park, operations were good, everything that could run on two was on two trains, some breakdowns but overall Merlin could benefit from a day here to compare operations. But I'll say it again, boy were some of the coasters rough, especially the mouse and grand national, loved Skyforce, got 32 spins on my first go.

Does seem illogical to take trains off but I guess they have their reasons, maybe they want to minimise the wear and tear on the trains, there wasn't even enough people riding Inferno to fill a single train let alone two lol. Does anybody know who this Wilkinson is that's on the 14th? We're due to go then with some friends and I'm trying to guage how busy it'll be, Vamps, Little Mix and Rizzle Kicks are the only ones I've heard of,, to me Wilkinson is a shop....

Some of the boards were wrong, for Tidal Wave we waited all of 2 minutes around 9, and Colossus was walk on even though the board was saying 50 minutes, I asked the ride op about the board and they said someone had set it wrong and they couldn't be bothered to change it. There was more people there though, and was it just me or did the concert end much earlier that the Little Mix one? Little Mix went on to about 9.15 but we were waiting for Colossus front row (a massive 5 minute wait) at about 8.30 when all the concert people piled into the queue.

There was no soundtrack/countdown tonight, scared the crap out the poor lad next to me as it dropped without 'warning' (it's alright for us that know when it's going to drop, but it was this lads first go), he looked a bit green coming off haha

Wow it was walk on Tuesday (on two trains) during the afternoon. Dispatch was so slow on Swarm and Nemesis though (lack of staff maybe) that they could have run them both on a single train and it not had made any difference to the queue length.

I thought the same too, fantastic bit of free advertising if nothing else lol.

It's all over the Sun front page tomorrow too (or maybe the Mirror, can't remember).

Fury was down yesterday too.

The ride looked very sad yesterday, all quiet and still.

I just had to order a ticket for my sons friend and the email turned up immediately, although it did go straight to the spam folder. The email is identical to the popup confirmation you get on the confirmation page when you click ' view your receipt' only difference is it says on the bottom please remember to bring the card used for the purchase. The eventbrite page is a hidden event, you can access it from the page on Thorpe's site where they list the Summer Nights tickets (link at bottom), interestingly tomorrow night is now 'sold out' of the Premium/VIP free tickets, so it'll be interesting to see how busy the park is compared to last week.

Not a MAP holder then? If it's through eventbrite you can just login and reprint the ticket, but I dunno about ordering through the Thorpe site. Weather will be 'proper summer weather' tomorrow, rain again Sunday.