Fred

There's loads of unsung heroes around every park. Have you ever started at 6am to clean retail and F&B units before moving onto your normal dept for the day? .Loads of depts go unnoticed, every dept has at least one fantastic worthwhile person, its what makes the parks that bit special is that there are loads of people who genuinely care about it all.

Someone we know has an amazing story of how they were plonked onto operating corkscrew in a yorkshire park with no training. Epic!I doubt its much to do with H&S regulations, its more to show the competance of the park and their operators should something go wrong. There's very little training on some rides at a theme park I know as well.

Spinball looks terrible! Yay for another tussauds type sponsorship

Yay they've stopped making market square look like a building site during the winter. About time

You'd love it. Cheers though

..My post says how you get a car to yourself. Just visit 95% of the time, no queue, get car to self.

Yeah it says control. Replacing what used to say "race control".

Go pretty much 95% of the time then lol. Very rarely have I walked in on a queue.

Towers was under snow yesterday

Loving all the PR poo in there as well, especially "Rollercoaster endurance".. one hour of air.Is that to test boredom levels ready for new ride?

Haven't heard anything which suggests the actual rita name is going. Wouldn't be surprised if it stayed, as rita is a brraaanndd

I would say make the most of it. The smarter you are, the better impression you give off. It's one of the categories in their little checklists anyway.

I have a gigantic alton towers mug, it holds like 5 cups of tea worth. It's amazing, yet so so heavy

Nice to be against the rules sometimes eh? Be careful with that water though, they had a few times where the chlorine was too strong and stained peoples clothing, and other times where peoples hands have had lovely infections. But then again, it does say to keep hands and arms inside of boat

Slightly unique, but I love how wooded the area is, its gorgeous!

Just a shame that 8carl8 is winning something he did on his uni course, instead of something we had to do within like 3 days.

Jungle was pretty much like rattlesnake, but about one quarter of the speed. The lids just made it feel like you were in a lorry, not the best experience ever.

Muhahaha. Least everyone can see it though, so you can just not count my vote

Black bin bags are always the best place for thorpe park stuff.

I was in the very exclusive member group "banned", yet still being able to post. It was amazing.

Go speed!

Introducing: Land of Irony.Shown on sign as "land of" due to running out of time to paint irony on the board before the park opened.Unfortunately, due to lack of planning.. the entrance to the land is via one pathway, which floods whenever it rains making the island inaccessible during light showers.Its position is a new island being put there today. Like we all know.. the water needs to go somewhere. Hence why thorpe flooded one of the carparks. To ensure the carpark does not exceed demand, they've introduced a carparking charge.The theme is consistent and unique to the park, mainly due to them realising first off that their budget WILL be cut which led to their half arsed attitude. The theming is very pristine, complete with half built shops which have all sorts of colours of paints on them. The one which is open, is the very british "Cadrafty's" chocolate store. There's even one or two.. (or maybe 6) HBL outlets for you to win AMAAAZZINNGG prizes!There will be many many bins, and loads and loads of staff. Unfortunately the park decide to hire agency workers/outsource their ES dept again, so nothing gets done and the bins overflow regularly. Fittingly, it makes the area actually look better.Contains:Newly relocated Jungle Coaster, complete with lids, from legoland windsor. This is to help improve the relations between the park and the guests noise-wise.Meant to be the parks icon coaster for the land, it can barely get throughputs higher than fungle did. The name is not changed, as the park thought it would suit the area best if it was to retain its name. You know, for theming and marketing purposes..Also, samurai moving over after being dragged by a couple of lorries into its new position. It's slogan is "scarier than your granny's scooter". There's a huuuuugeee empty space for development, which was meant to be for some stuff until we couldn't be bothered to design anything etc. The land was meant to increase overall capacity, but it kind of has due to the size of the queuelines and the island.As I'm sure you all agree, the theme is unique and realistic, takes into considerations the restrictions for the parks, has potential for expansion by filling the huge empty space or infilling more land, and the theme is equally strong. Although not disney, I'm sure the PR dept can sort that out for us.Finally, yes we know it's ****.. but afterall, I'm just creating this land to stay in my job and doing my job role in a hope of gaining a bonus. This is the REASON why this land has been created.So, for the love of irony - vote for me

And in MY opinion, you like AMUSEMENT parks instead of THEME parks.Good points:It makes moneyBad points:The park is ****.

Station was gutted by maintenance contractors who had to lower the floor to accomodate the new trains (look on the walls, you can see the old level of the station, and if you look on the farewell vampire video, you'll notice the lovely drop down between the platforms).The gates obviously went with that, as the floor was lowered, and they simply chose the quick cheap option of getting vekoma to install the airgates (goes in pairs you see - hence they don't fit with the ride!). Fun.

Yeah, unfortunately its not just as simple as them using prototypes etc.It's how much their engineering budget is, and what experience and skills the engineers have themselves.Remember that some of the engineers have been there since the 90s, and therefore had pretty much no experience in these other rides, compiled with the budgets perhaps being too small, which meant reliability went down. It's no coincidence that merlin taking over has changed the engineering depts and reliability at the parks since 07.