Ian-S

Europa is owned by Mack, not Merlin. Merlin's European parks are Gardaland and Heide Park.

Legoland Bilund too presumably?

not burst anyone's bubble it may be popular for 2 years then after that they will go bankrupt and Merlin will buy it on the cheap 

Presumably then, Merlin aren't in it to make money? Why are we thinking this new place would use the same logic in a different way?
 
Don't get me wrong, I think it will be great for the UK industry to have some serious competition to Merlin, but there is nothing like enough known yet to have any idea what approach they will take to empty our pockets.

The back room workings of corporations can be a mystery, Microsoft bailed out Apple yet they were both huge rivals, same for Sky buying into ITV when they hit trouble, I'm not saying Merlin are involved, but if they were it would make commercial sense even if it doesn't to an outsider, they have experience in running theme parks, that experience is worth money (what experience does the BBC have?), being involved gives you a share of the profits if done right or a huge consultancy fee, this project appears to be going ahead regardless so in theory there's a choice, bury your head or get involved it doesn't have to be directly, they have plenty of subsidiaries they can use.I have a friend who spent the better part of the 1990's bailing out and buying shares in all his rivals, at the time it made no sense to me, he should have just let them goto the wall and moved into their markets, but he continued and today he has a slice of every sector of his industry, all of them bringing in their own income streams, as well as his own successful supply chain, the return on those bailouts is massive, and for the most part, the majority of people have no clue the 'competiting' rivals they pick and choose to buy from, are all owned by the one person.
I don't doubt Paramount have what some call editorial control, but it might not be as controlling as you think, as long as LRCH pay their dues and don't give Paramount a bad reputation (like killing people or casting the brand poorly) they likely have full freedom to do as they wish within the scope of the IP's.This is similar to how Richard Branson runs Virgin, he only owns the airline himself, the rest is licensed branding, NTL/Telewest run Virgin Media and Mobile, before that the Prince behind A1GP ran Virgin Mobile, Branson himself has nothing to do with the everyday running of the businesses.
Paramount won't care if the park runs at a loss, as long as they're paid their licensing costs, neither frankly will the Kuwaiti's, it's just a tax dodge for them, they might get bored eventually and want out, but the market value of their holding will far outweight their initial investment.
Just my 2p worth mind you

Ho hum, This simply isn't a patch on merlins theming. I cant see a shipping container or dirty derelict building anywhere.

^ You're assuming Paramount won't have the same corporate outlook, if there's anything I've learnt over the years, don't expect a new entrant into a market to shake it up, they are far more likely to toe the existing party line, especially if they see that existing heavyweights have got away with screwing their customers year on year (just look at the domestic electric and gas supplies in this Country which is also a captive audience, the supply chain was opened up to create competition, in effect all it did was create cartels as none of the competitors offer radically different packages from each other, 'new' suppliers don't massively undercut the existing suppliers, even though they can because it's not good practice to undersell yourself too much).
The only thing Paramount will bring is an alternative place for us to go that's not owned by Merlin, us Southerns are seriously lacking in non-Merlin owned parks, Paultons is the only one (easily accessible for South of River residents) of any consequence and that only has 2 decent roller coasters.
In other news, anyone considering a trip to Chessie on 15th May don't bother, the place will be overrun with hundreds of unrulely hyperactive school kids that day (my son's school has their annual visit).

Are parks in this country really so poor that people think queueing an hour for Monkey Swinger is in any way acceptable?  It baffles me that a park can be so mediocre for so long and yet it seems to have no impact on visitor numbers.

^Summer Nights last year was only charging £5 for annual pass holders for three hours of exclusive ride time with no queues. We even managed 39 rides in three hours!
If I were you I would wait and see if a summer nights style event returns, as this one is much more hefty in price and the concept of this is to watch some live music alongside a couple of rides whereas summer nights was purely based around riding rollercoasters in the sunset with minimal queueing times. The concept of this event is rather different so it has the potential to be much busier.

Source (in Dutch) - http://www.vijfzintuigen.nl/forum/136/24466.186
 
I think this really shows the scale of the building we're looking at!  

I do believe Colossus normally stalls on the final turn. As the corkscrews are slightly inclined downwards

In future if you hover you mouse over the acronym, a full description will pop up! Edit: Like DLP

My dad would say you have a weak neck then, even though the last coater he went in was the Corckscrew 20 years ago haha.

It's a re-curring issue at all of the Merlin parks, they tend to update the queue times as they get longer however once they drop again, they don't bother to change the boards. In the last few hours, most of the queue times are 30-60minutes off the real queue length which can be really annoying especially when deciding what attraction to ride next in the last few hours on the park.It's potentially for several reasons:
-To increase fastrack sales.
-To stop people going to the attraction as the queue is too "long" which means the staff can relax and slow down on operations.
-The ride operator simply can't be bothered to update the queuetime if it gets shorter.
It doesn't bother me too much as I tend to look at queue length rather than the board and mainly judge from there however it certainly puts you off going to a ride like Swarm where you have to walk ages to get there and then risk the queue being longer than you think it is due to them not updating the boards.
Of course at the end of the day though it's better as it being advertised as longer than it really is rather than shorter than it really is. Ideally, they could just bother to update the queue boards so there is an accurate representation of actual queue times across the park.

Better than when they advertise something as 40 mins and you end up queuing for over an hour (for example)

Its 100 more people per hour than the park was managing last year. Then again I value this attraction at absolutely nothing. I wouldn't even wait if the queue was 0 minutes as it still takes away 5 minutes of my day I could have used else where. I can always find a breezy hill else where. The throughput on this is shocking and the amount it must cost to run must be quite high because of all the actors. I would have preferred the money to be spent on some paint around the park. 

Its called no limits 2. Takes absolutely ages to get anything done on it and it isn't the most user friendly program in the world but it is fun if you have plenty of time. I do believe it is on steam if you are interested. 

That's all well and good when all the staff are doing their jobs and not standing on the center track chatting during loading.
I felt so sorry for the old guy with white hair who was forced to check everybody's belts twice while his colleague stood on the track in front of us swapping sweets with the guy on the right hand side who was undoubtly supposed to be doing the exact same job, but alas thought it more important to give his colleague a sweet and slag off a disabled guy who the other staff were trying to unload off the train. We had to do our own belts up ourselves.
I would have said something but got the feeling that the race card would have been pulled if I had.
(This was a couple weeks ago, not recent).

To me it implies a lack of competition in the market. You want to go to a theme park of medium thrill in the south east. Due to there being very little competition they have the choice of CWOA or pretty much nothing. The other competitors (of which there are not many in the first place) are too small and as a result cant advertise like COWA can. The same can be said for Thorpe apart from that literally has no competitors which offers a place of big thrills. What should be happening is Thorpe, CWOA and Legoland should all be competing against each other. But they are owned by the Merlin monopoly so the market doesn't work. As a result merlin can do almost anything they like and they will still get customers. 

I like it, the queuing that is, in that the more people tied up with this item means less people in the ride queues, 'cos I wouldn't do a maze.

10 til midnight in the summer on Saturdays. Its a dream which I feel I will never see become reality. 

I'm really hoping that should be reserve and they haven't done a Swarm on it!

The First bits of track are now starting to appear on the new structure of the ride.
Dare I say this for me at the moment is perhaps the most exciting thing happening in thrmepark in the uk at the moment?

Just had a thought, the whole park is a mess as it is in terms of themes next to each other, but wont it look incredibly odd a victorian warehouse next to a jungle and sling shot birds....just saying.

That's half the fun of it, speculate like mental now and see who was right later down the line.