Matt N

The Sun has published an article on this incident: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/29498753/alton-towers-fire-wicker-man/ Interestingly, the cause is thought to be a “foreign object” according to an Alton Towers spokesperson… could this mean that a guest dropped something flammable on the track or something? It will also be “closed until further notice” while the park carries out “essential maintenance”, apparently… whether that means a day, a week, or longer is anyone’s guess. It’s a relief that this seemingly didn’t cause any major damage. I am slightly disappointed that this probably means that my favourite ride on park will be closed for my visit on Sunday, but I did get 2 rides on it in March, one of which was an unexpected night ride, so I can’t really complain too much!

Excellent news! Hopefully the extension of hours rather than cutting hours like Alton Towers are is a sign of Thorpe Park doing well this year! My only concern, though, is that there may not be demand for it. I remember Thorpe Park doing 8pm closes back in August 2019; I went to one of them, and the park had completely emptied out before 6pm. It was brilliant for repeat riding, but a damning indictment of the demand for late night openings… those 8pm openings were quickly dropped shortly after my visit. This is a positive sign on the whole, though! I don’t know if anyone else agrees, but overall, it does seem to me like Thorpe Park is the most prosperous UK Merlin park this year. The Hyperia buzz could be partially contributing to this, but it doesn’t seem like Thorpe has the general air of negativity surrounding it that Chessington and particularly Alton Towers currently have.

Out of interest, I’d be curious to know; which row do people find rougher on Saw? Personally, I find the front notably rougher than the back, as a general rule. On my most recent visit to Thorpe, I actually did 2 rides on Saw; I had one in the back, which was a bit rough in places, but not too bad overall, and I had one in the front, which was really rough. However, I’ve heard others say that the back is way rougher and the front is smoother, which completely contrasts with my experiences…

I’d be really interested to know how it works too! In all likelihood, it’s probably some degree of glancing and estimating from the staff. In some cases, I’m not even sure they do that; in one instance logged in my spreadsheet, Vampire at Chessington was advertised at 5 minutes, yet it was nearly out the entrance and I waited 60… I had an idea in my head of a near foolproof way of reliably estimating queue times. Imagine some sort of system that logs the amount of people entering and leaving the queue that’s paired with the ride computer system that logs the ride throughput, uniting queue entry/exit management and ride throughput management in perfect unison to make a wonderful, near foolproof queue time estimation system! Goodness knows how you’d implement it technically, but in the world of IoT and the like, it must surely be possible, at the very least… It’s unlikely to ever come to fruition, but I can dream!

Disclaimer: This is a long, geeky post. If you don't like statistics or maths talk, turn back now! If you'd like a more concise summary, a TL;DR can be found at the bottom. Hi guys. When you go to a park, you will often see advertised queue times all over the place to help you determine how long the ride queues are. But sometimes, you might find that these do not necessarily tell the truth. At times, you might get in a queue with a reasonable advertised time and wait far longer than expected, and at other times, you might get in a queue with a long advertised time and wait far less than expected. With this in mind, you might be wondering; how accurate actually are these advertised queue times? Can they be relied upon? Or are they largely hokum? Well, dear reader, that is the question I'm aiming to answer today. Through the power of statistics, I am going to work out; how accurate are advertised queue times? Let's firstly start with the methodology of my statistical analysis... Methodology You might be wondering "Matt, how on Earth are you going to get hold of advertised and actual queue time data to conduct this analysis?". Well, the answer to that is that I had an idea... for years, I've been writing trip reports from various theme parks, and within these, I often make reference to the advertised queue time and how it compared to the actual queue time. And I was thinking that I could use my anecdotes from some of these trip reports as samples for the analysis. Yes, there's finally a day where my comparisons of advertised and actual queue times come in handy! My method entailed reading my various trip reports from the UK Merlin parks from over the years and looking for anecdotes referring to the advertised queue time in comparison to the actual queue time of a ride. I chose the UK Merlin parks because these are where I have by far the most data from, and they are also likely to share similar technology, processes and the like for determining advertised queue times, which removes any uncertainty from working with companies with differing processes. I should note that I did not count every time I went on a ride. I only counted rides where there was one of: An explicit comparison between advertised queue time and actual queue time given. A comparison between advertised queue time and actual queue time that heavily hinted towards the actual queue time given. For instance, words like "walk-on" or "I waltzed straight onto the train" would infer a 0 minute actual queue time, and words like "the queue time board stayed true to its word" would infer no discrepancy between the advertised and actual queue times. There were rides I did not count, as I felt that they would not be representative of the actual main queue. These are: Any time where I talk about using a Single Rider Queue or otherwise benefitting considerably from single rider status (such as being called to walk past a long queue to fill an empty seat). Any time where I talk about using Fastrack or similar. Any time where I talk about waiting longer for a specific experience, such as the front row. Through these rules, I was able to gather: 15 days and 75 rides of data from Alton Towers, dating back as far as 23rd June 2019 9 days and 48 rides of data from Thorpe Park, dating back as far as 6th May 2018. 3 days and 9 rides of data from Legoland Windsor, dating back as far as 31st August 2017. 1 day and 3 rides of data from Chessington, from 17th September 2023. I should also give a few caveats. These are: This is my data and mine only. There are multiple reasons why that means that it may not be a fully representative sample. For example, Chessington and Legoland are under-represented, whereas Alton Towers and Thorpe Park are over-represented. The actual level of understatement may be higher than what this analysis suggests, as this only factors in queues I have personally waited in. If a queue looks vastly understated at first glance, there's a good chance I won't join it. Where I provided a range of time for the actual queue length, I went with the upper bound. For example, if I described a queue as taking 20-25 minutes, I logged the actual queue time as 25 minutes. I should strongly emphasise that this is not a massively exact science. The measurement of actual queue time was me looking at my watch throughout the queue, and for a variety of reasons, the movement of a queue can be affected in ways that the advertised time can't account for. With this out of the way, let's move onto the actual meat of the analysis... For each part of the analysis, I'll look at an individual park, as well as all 4 Merlin parks amalgamated together. For the individual park, I picked Alton Towers, as this is the park for which I have the most data. Let's start with a simple correlation analysis to determine the strength of the relationship between advertised queue time and actual queue time... Correlation For those not aware, the correlation between two variables determines whether or not they are inter-related. The magnitude of a correlation lies between 0 and 1, with 0 indicating no correlation and 1 indicating a perfect strong correlation, and a correlation can also be positive or negative. A positive correlation means that as the value of one variable rises, the value of the other rises in unison, while a negative correlation means that as the value of one variable rises, the value of the other falls. Now that I've explained a bit about correlation, let's have a look at what the data says about the correlation between advertised queue time and actual queue time! I'll consider two different correlation coefficients, Pearson and Spearman. Pearson's correlation coefficient assumes a linear relationship between two variables, whereas Spearman's correlation coefficient does not. If we look at Alton Towers on an individual level, the scatter graph of advertised queue time and actual queue time looks something like this: And the correlation figures are as follows: Correlation Type Correlation Coefficient (2dp) Correlation Classification Pearson 0.67 Moderate Positive Correlation Spearman 0.74 Moderate Positive Correlation Whereas if we look at the UK Merlin parks overall, the scatter graph of advertised queue times versus actual queue times is as follows: And the correlation figures are as follows: Correlation Type Correlation Coefficient (2dp) Correlation Classification Pearson 0.65 Moderate Positive Correlation Spearman 0.70 Moderate Positive Correlation So if we look at correlation, I think we can conclude that there is a relationship between advertised queue time and actual queue time. Based on correlation alone, we can infer that on a general level, there is a moderate-to-strong correlation between advertised and actual queue time, so if the advertised queue time increases, you can generally expect actual queue time to increase along with it. However, the correlation is far from a perfect positive correlation, so this will not be the case in every scenario. In fact, the fact that the positive correlation does not even quite breach the threshold of "strong" (which I was told was 0.75) would suggest that this is not always the case by a long shot, and the relationship is far from perfectly proportional. So in general, the correlation analysis would suggest that the advertised queue times are trustworthy to a broad extent to get a gauge of the broader picture, but perhaps with a notable margin of error for exact figures. Let's now look at the average discrepancy... Discrepancy (Vector) Let's now look at the average discrepancy as a vector quantity. Vector quantities have both magnitude and direction, so this form of discrepancy will consider whether the queue is overstated or understated as well as its actual magnitude. Where the queue is overstated, the discrepancy is negative, whereas the discrepancy is positive where the queue is understated. If we firstly look at Alton Towers on an individual level, here are the boxplots showing the ranges of raw and proportional discrepancies respectively. It's important to consider proportional discrepancy because if an advertised queue time is longer, there's bound to be a larger discrepancy in general: And the raw and proportional discrepancy stats, as well as average queue time, are as follows. Both mean and median values are provided, as each metric has flaws in isolation and I felt that showing both offered maximum transparency: Average Advertised Queue Time (minutes, 1dp) Average Raw Discrepancy (minutes, 1dp) Average Proportional Discrepancy (1dp) Adjusted Average Proportional Discrepancy (1dp) Mean (Calculated Average) 28.3 2.2 8.8% 7.8% Median (Middle Value) 25 0 0% 0% I should clarify that Average Proportional Discrepancy is the average of the proportional discrepancies listed alongside each anecdote, which excludes those where the advertised queue time was 0 minutes and the actual queue time was a different number (you cannot divide a non-zero number by 0, so a percentage proportion cannot be provided). Adjusted Average Proportional Discrepancy is a simpler calculation of Average Raw Discrepancy as a share of Average Advertised Queue Time on an overall basis, which (sort of) takes these into account. If we now look at the UK Merlin parks overall, here are the boxplots showing the ranges of raw and proportional discrepancy respectively: And the raw and proportional discrepancy stats, as well as average advertised queue time, are as follows: Average Advertised Queue Time (minutes, 1dp) Average Raw Discrepancy (minutes, 1dp) Average Proportional Discrepancy (1dp) Adjusted Average Proportional Discrepancy (1dp) Mean (Calculated Average) 26.1 1.3 13.7% 5.1% Median (Middle Value) 25 0 0% 0% So looking at this, Alton Towers and UK Merlin queue times are understated by up to 1-2 minutes on average. If we look at the median, that would imply that there's no discrepancy between advertised and actual queue time at all on average, and even the higher mean values infer that there are average discrepancies of less than 10% in some cases. At face value, these stats would give reason to believe that Merlin's advertised queue times are very accurate overall, with an average error of only 1-2 minutes and less than 10%. However, you should note my use of the term "at face value"... because that's not the full picture. You might remember that earlier, I said about how the discrepancy being shown here is a vector quantity, meaning that it has both magnitude and direction. That means that understated queues have a positive discrepancy value and overstated queues have a negative discrepancy value, so the two balance each other out. So while you'd think that the low average discrepancies shown here mean that the queue times are very accurate... the use of vector discrepancies here mean that all this really shows is that understating and overstating balance each other out quite nicely, meaning that you can't really rely on Merlin parks to understate or overstate their queues. They both understate and overstate to broadly equal extents. To get the true picture of how accurate these queue times really are, we need to convert the discrepancy values into a scalar quantity and look at the absolute values of discrepancy... Absolute Discrepancy To get the true gist of how accurate these queue times really are, let's now look at the absolute discrepancy values. Absolute means that only the magnitude of discrepancy is considered, and that the discrepancy values are scalar quantities rather than vector quantities. If we firstly look at Alton Towers on an individual level, the boxplots showing the range of raw and proportional absolute discrepancy values are as follows: And the raw and proportional absolute discrepancy stats, as well as average queue time, are as follows: Average Advertised Queue Time (minutes, 1dp) Average Raw Absolute Discrepancy (minutes, 1dp) Average Proportional Absolute Discrepancy (1dp) Adjusted Average Proportional Absolute Discrepancy (1dp) Mean (Calculated Average) 28.3 14.1 39.3% 49.6% Median (Middle Value) 25 10 27.5% 40% If we look at the UK Merlin parks overall, the boxplots showing the ranges of raw and proportional absolute discrepancy are as follows: And the raw and proportional absolute discrepancy stats, as well as average queue time, are as follows: Average Advertised Queue Time (minutes, 1dp) Average Raw Absolute Discrepancy (minutes, 1dp) Average Proportional Absolute Discrepancy (1dp) Adjusted Average Proportional Absolute Discrepancy (1dp) Mean 26.1 13.5 58.7% 51.6% Median 25 5 33.3% 20% So looking at these stats, UK Merlin queue times are wrong by 5-15 minutes on average, and broadly, the average proportional absolute discrepancy ranges between 20% and almost 60%. This would imply that the advertised queue times are not phenomenally accurate, and may not be 100% correct in terms of the exact figure on average. However, it would suggest that they are still quite good at a more general level to get a general gauge of how long a queue might be. If a queue is advertised at 100 minutes, it's unlikely to be walk-on, and vice versa. These figures suggest that the advertised queue times can generally be used as a broad gauge of the length of the queue, but should not be taken as gospel and the exact figures should be taken with some degree of caution. Let's now look at some final conclusions... Conclusion So in conclusion, how accurate are these advertised queue times? Well, I think these results show that they're overall reasonable as a gauge of the broad ballpark the queue time is likely to fall into, but have somewhat weaker accuracy at determining exact queue times. In terms of the correlation analysis, the advertised queue time and the actual queue time have a reasonable correlation, but not a perfect one. The two are moderately positively correlated, with a correlation coefficient of around 0.6-0.7, which would suggest that the two variables are broadly related and do increase in unison with one another in general, but this is far from a perfectly proportional increase and is not a perfect rule by any means. On average, the vector discrepancy between advertised queue time and actual queue time was to be understated by 1-2 minutes, and the percentage margin of error was often to be understated by less than 10%. This suggests that understating and overstating overall happen to roughly equal degrees, and you can't really rely on Merlin to reliably do either. On average, the absolute discrepancy between advertised queue time and actual queue time was 5-15 minutes, and the percentage margin of error for the advertised queue time was between 20% and 60%. This would suggest that the advertised queue times are rarely 100% accurate and should be treated with a degree of caution and a margin of error, but that they're generally decent as a way of gauging broadly how long a queue will be. If a queue is advertised at 30 minutes, for example, you can assume that it will probably be between about 15 minutes and about 45 minutes. That is quite a wide margin, admittedly, but the advertised queue times are unlikely to be amazingly wrong, on the whole. A 30 minute advertised queue, as an example, would indicate a roughly "middle of the road" queue time with a reasonable degree of reliability; the queue is unlikely to be obscenely short, but it's unlikely to be obscenely long as well. So in conclusion, I think this analysis suggests that the advertised queue times are decent for getting an idea of broadly how long a queue is likely to be, but are worse at pinpointing the actual exact queue time, and the estimates should be considered with a good margin of error and not taken as exact estimates. If you'd like to look at my data, here are the full spreadsheets for Alton Towers and UK Merlin queue times respectively: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c2b05czi2xwwDxKRVBMJ9qyB3_-_b0RyMdc-N8n8JJI/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jpqqpu2pErHY41vHTpDP_NEZqnjuMwgtVVp99JexjvI/edit?usp=sharing So that brings us to the end of this statistical analysis! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed concocting it, and I hope you found it interesting! I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts; I'm receptive to any feedback, good or bad! TL;DR: I performed a statistical analysis to try and determine how accurate advertised queue times are, using datasets of advertised vs actual queue times in Alton Towers and the UK Merlin parks taken from my past trip reports. A correlation analysis showed that there was a moderate positive correlation of magnitude 0.6-0.7 between advertised and actual queue time, indicating that they do generally increase in unison, but that this is far from a perfect trend and this is not necessarily a proportional increase. An analysis of average vector discrepancies showed that Merlin parks do not reliably understate or overstate queue times, with both understating and overstating happening to broadly equal degrees. An analysis of average absolute discrepancies showed that the queue times can provide a broad idea of roughly how long a queue may be, but are unlikely to be too accurate at determining the exact queue time.

It appears that a 10 minute lift hill stoppage on Sunday made the news and has unfortunately been reported as the ride “breaking again”. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uks-tallest-rollercoaster-hyperia-grinds-33304243 I know that this was only a minor stoppage that was resolved quickly, but they really will have to hope that it runs flawlessly from here on out, or else the media will leap on every small issue to further the notion that it’s an unreliable ride.

On a slight side tangent, what is the Single Rider Queue like on Hyperia? Does it tend to offer a notable advantage over the main queue, or is any significant advantage potential negated by it being quite busy? Does it get busy, or is it usually quite quiet? I’m going next month, and I was pondering whether I could potentially use it for a reride if my parents and grandad allow me to reride and they don’t want to go back on. I wouldn’t want to only have 1 ride on Hyperia if possible, but I obviously wouldn’t like to bet on what queue times will be like during August.

All of these good reviews of Hyperia make me excited to ride it, and gutted that I was unable to back in June! I’m now going next month, so I hope it plays ball until then… As for the splashdown area; that does look like a key disappointment of mine. The effect appears to be a complete damp squib, being hard to photograph from in the area, and I’m also not a fan of the presentation of the surrounding lake based on how it looks in POVs. I’d have hoped that they’d at least tidy up the weeds in it.

My apologies for bumping this thread, but as I posted in it with university woes at an earlier stage, I feel I should offer an update… I’ve had my final degree award confirmed this morning… and I got a First Class Honours, with my final award mark being 82.85/100! That means I am now a degree graduate, with a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Gloucestershire! My journey through university has not been plain sailing, but I’m happy I did it, and I’m pleased and relieved to finally have a degree!

It's unfortunate, but I think running on one train is the lesser of two evils compared to not having it running at all. At least the park are psyching people up for it being on one train in advance and warning that queueing times could be extended, though, so it won't come as a surprise. I must admit, though, that I am morbidly intrigued to see how long the advertised queue gets with 1 train operation on the ride's 2nd operating weekend...

Personally, I think that Thorpe could do with a big coaster with a 1.2m height restriction. A starter thrill coaster of sorts, most probably non-inverting. Something along the lines of a GCI woodie would work really well, in my view; it would be great fun and really rerideable, and it would also provide a nice starter thrill coaster, as well as another non-inverting thrill coaster that’s longer than Stealth. I think that something like a GCI would really add variety to Thorpe Park’s lineup and help make the park a more compelling proposition for older families.

Hyperia’s train is now actively being lifted off the track as we speak:

There is now work underway to hoist or rescue the train in some capacity: Hopefully this means that they can clear the stall, test it again and reopen promptly!

I had a really weird and surprisingly in-depth theme park dream last night that I just had to tell you all about! To set the scene, I was visiting “Fantasy Island in Skegness” for the first time with my family (well, it started as my nuclear family, anyway…). I put the name in quotation marks because as is usual with dream theme parks, this version of Fantasy Island had a fair few… discrepancies with the real life version. The day started with stuff that is actually in the real Fantasy Island, with Odyssey and Millennium being on my mind. Me and my dad initially took our seats on Odyssey. We were on the front row, and I was excited for the ride ahead. When we started ascending the lift hill, I was naturally smitten with being on the front row, and I bizarrely said “we’ve got good weather for it; I’m so glad that we weren’t plagued by weather bad enough to cause the ride to close”… even know there was fog so thick you could hardly see ahead of you, waves crashing over the pier, and wind so strong you could feel the structure shaking! My luck was not to last, however… as when we were near the top, a very loud siren suddenly started going off, with the words “WARNING: Bad weather alert! Activate abort sequence!”. We kept ascending the lift hill for a bit, so me and my dad looked at each other, completely bemused… but then, the ride suddenly dropped backwards back down the lift hill, without any prior warning, and whacked us back into the station at full speed. Thankfully, the ride had the hardest station brakes ever and was able to stop a full speed train in the station in a matter of seconds, and the staff just nonchalantly opened our restraints as though nothing had just happened and said “sorry, the ride’s closed due to weather”. After I got off Odyssey with my dad, quite a lot else happened. I struggle to piece together the exact sequence of events, as it was a bit of a blur, but I remember quite a few of the different attractions we did and a few of the different things that happened. These include: I had some sort of absolute temper tantrum in a random car park somewhere over Odyssey and Millennium being closed due to the weather. My sister was trying to console me, but to no avail; she was saying to me “Don’t worry, Matthew, we can always come back”, but I was angrily sobbing and yelling “No, [sister’s name]; this was my only chance and I BLEW IT!” before sobbing uncontrollably… in the background, Donald Trump was bizarrely there, yelling “This is fake news!” and “We need to build a wall around Fantasy Island!” We went in an attraction entitled “Gangsta Granny: The Experience”, ostensibly themed to the David Walliams book Gangsta Granny… which simply consisted of being repeatedly yelled at by a slightly drunk elderly lady eating chips and tomato ketchup and drinking a bottle of whisky. The lady also had a Southern US accent; think along the lines of Meemaw out of Young Sheldon. We went in a very long educational dark ride about the D-Day landings… I fell asleep halfway through it and got yelled at by my parents at the end as a result. They called me an “unpatriotic traitor” and “Hitler sympathiser”… We went on a ride that somehow had the ability to be a shape-shifting ride system; it started as a junior coaster, shape-shifted into a flying theatre halfway through and then shape-shifted back into a junior coaster at the end. Think along the lines of if The Dragon and Flight of the Sky Lion at Legoland Windsor had a baby and had the ability to shape-shift into one another. On this ride, my nan and grandad, as well as an 88 year old relative who I don’t think I’ve ever seen ride a roller coaster, popped up out of nowhere. We went onto a racing mat water slide whose theming was a bizarre hybrid of Minifigure Speedway at Legoland Windsor and VelociCoaster at Islands of Adventure… the ride had the racing lights, Roxy announcements and Team Legends and Team Allstars like Minifigure Speedway, but had a Jurassic World-themed queue, complete with raptors and a Bryce Dallas Howard/Chris Pratt pre-show video, like VelociCoaster. This Minifigure Speedway/VelociCoaster theming hybrid continued into the ride itself, with the ride containing upbeat racing music and announcements punctuated with odd sirens and raptor growls every now and then… the ride was also very short, at probably no more than 10 seconds long. We went into an attraction named “Hall of Tories”, which was kind of like a less celebratory version of the Disney classic Hall of Presidents. An animatronic version of each Tory Prime Minister post-2010 stood up and made a short speech, similar to the presidents in the Disney attraction, but towards the end, an animatronic Keir Starmer piped up from the back, started ranting about the Tories’ 14 year record in government and then encouraged the audience to throw foam balls at the animatronic Tories, from a bucket that suddenly appeared beneath the audience’s seats. The animatronic Tories tried to fight back with lines such as “£2,000 more tax under Labour!”, but eventually, the attraction ended with animatronic Starmer and the audience winning against the animatronic Tories. We went into a dark ride named “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, ostensibly themed to the Roald Dahl children’s novel of the same name. It claimed to be a “world-class immersive experience”, but was more akin to that AI Willy Wonka event in Glasgow in reality… We went to have burgers, and I kept laughing at the numerous typos around and saying I had to post them in TowersStreet’s “Merlin Typos and Grammatical Errors” thread… at this point, my uncle and cousins also appeared out of nowhere. To top things off, my entire family randomly became Asian at some point in the dream… when I was getting off a ride and looking for my family, an Asian woman wearing my mum’s clothes started beckoning me over in Mandarin (which I somehow understood…), and I followed along and thought nothing of it! It’s a while since I’ve had a theme park dream that’s been that much of an acid trip… I forgot just how utterly random and incomprehensible they can be!

I’m hearing word from a number of sources that Hyperia has stalled… I should stress that there is not photo or video confirmation of this at present, but if true, this isn’t good… It was all going so well after they resolved the stoppage on Saturday… EDIT - Here’s the best video I can find: Unsurprisingly, it appears to have stalled on the big outerbank.