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Fred

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Posts posted by Fred

  1. Chessington is a family park, not a kids park. And therefore should cater for everyone.

    It'll lead those children waiting to be tall enough to be able to ride something bigger, whilst giving some fun to the older kids who probably don't enjoy berry bouncers half as much as they used to.

  2. I do adore oakwood, good park though not much there. Went for their fireworks event last year, thoroughly enjoyed it (though ride closing times were irritating).
    Will be going again this year for their fireworks event, though earlier in August so less busy hopefully.

    Food wise.. I thought their burgers were awful. Did not like them one bit. Don't like merlins brand of burgers either to be honest, it was just a shame it was only place without a queue at the time!

  3. Think both rides are supposed to require shoes but depends on the staff as I have personally seen Nemesis at AT stopped on the bottom part of the lift hill when someone wasn't wearing shoes and a staff member took the persons shoes up to them.

    No you haven't. Towers doesn't have any policy on wearing shoes on Nemesis, and they'll never stop it due to that. You're more than welcome to take them off as long as you don't delay the ride by doing so.

    Inferno I believe it's due to the woodchipping at the bottom of the lifthill making uncomfortable and a splintery experience, however they should just do away with the rule. It slows everything down for pretty much no reason.

  4. Towers ones are okay - the parkwide ones are rubbish (as Air and Sub Terra use 2 of the 4 items on every slide) but are updated every half hour. Actual ride ones are updated by the entrance hosts or the ride operator so are usually rather accurate. They just need more of them.

    Thorpe ones look lovely.

  5. Whoever thought putting a flipping siren on would sound good is bonkers.

    Some calm backing with something like "Thank you for visiting thorpe park, the ride queuelines have now closed. Have a safe and pleasant journey home!" followed by end of day or something would be alright.

  6. Yeah entirely depends where the store is located. The store I worked in had no "chavs" visiting and no security whatsoever, however a Croydon store I visited all the time and was full of security and all walks of life inside.

  7. The water shower tower before the camera busted years ago. That was a teaser of a spray!

    Nah it was turned off. Been mentioned many times on this forum that it does work, but turned off and the reason why. Think it was something to do with safety as people would stand or rock boat to move out of way of it.

  8. These days the ride is run so slowly you hardly get a good ride. And it's over no sooner than it's begun.

    Ripsaw seems to run like clockwork.

    From the scaffolding layout, I imagine motor replacement.

    Ripsaw has it's fair share of downtime. 2010 it was closed for a good 3 weeks or so in total purely down to motor replacement. It's just never reported as noones interested in the ride. It and rameses probably is down about the same.

  9. I've done a group of 4 a couple of weeks ago after waiting 10mins for the group to two to join us!

    It was literally amazing. Literally. Girlfriend shat it. Which was a shame, as I just wanted to re-ride and re-ride.

    No chance now, thing closes on Sunday and not available before then :(

  10. Why do they still think that batching people into the gates is a good idea? The tried it last year and it lasted 2 weeks (or less?) because it simply didn't work. There has never been an issue with people getting into the gates by themselves.

    Actually there has been. And you can batch properly. I worked on vampire for 3 years, and the issues relating to the previous way of doing things were:

    • People all queued up in the same lanes or near each other, leading to them either trying to push through and fill a train, having to go on seperate rides, or having a queueing time way more than some other rows.
    • Rows would become empty, as people wished to wait for their friends in other rows to align up with them
    • Back rows would be empty if disabled riders weren't there, and noone was willing to fill them
    • There was no good estimate of queue time. It could be 0mins, it could be 20mins in that station.
    • It looked a mess, was claustrophic and did not set a good example of what Chessington could achieve

    Batching should eliminate those problems - people will ride on same train, people will not be trying to get into each others seats, people will all have an equal queueing time from merge point.

    Batching works on every other sodding coaster and ride in the world, it's only Chessington which manages to cock it up so much that people believe the old system worked when it plainly didn't.

    When I worked there, you would get 750pph on 2 trains (thats a train dispatched just under every 2mins), and we were hitting 1100pph on 3 if we had an efficient team. It's awful that they don't even strive to achieve anywhere near that now. Bet fastrack allowances haven't been changed to accomodate that either.

  11. Picsolve have other motives, and her motives would be to gain as many photos as possible so that they achieve a higher sale rate and maybe linked to an incentive for her.

    Rides are different. They don't have targets, apart from achieving customer service and throughputs. Obviously at this park, throughputs have gone out of the window and they're concentrating purely on one thing, which is having a detrimental affect on both.

    That still hasn't changed.

    Who knows why they're doing it. I've asked a couple of the guys in the management team, to no response. Perhaps they're literally all new, perhaps they're having no encouragement by management, perhaps they're all useless. It's not to sell fastrack and make money, as rides are not a money making dept and have never, ever, been linked in such a way.

  12. Main Ride throughputs

    Dragons Fury 700

    Falls throughput 800

    Bubble works throughput 500

    Zufari throughput 800

    Vampire throughput 70

    Though if we make this more realistic:

    Fury - 400. Falls - 800. Bubble - 600. Zufari - ??. Vampire - Probably about 400 also.

    Either way, still utterly shocking.

  13. It's obviously in Merlin's interest for every ride to have a queue, so they are able to sell Fastrack and multi-day tickets... Do the staff have targets to hit, like they musk keep queue times above 30 mins, etc?

    No. I imagine they've brought in new rules which they're interpretting wrongly, or their staff are just ****. As I always say, noone intentionally builds a queue. Noone. For rides staff, the more fastrack = more stressful work is. So everyone tries to avoid that. I know, I've been there.

    As for this whole "merlin must want queues" bollocks - Thorpe are on full capacity more often than not, and towers have had mentions of good teams with extremely good dispatching on Nemesis over the forums so obviously it's not the mentality of all.

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