Mark9

Agreed. Ironically, I enjoy no way out far more then Colossus, Stealth and Saw which is a slightly odd view but it's one I take with pride

So went up to Alton Towers this weekend for me birthday and here is just a general round up of the highlights and lowlights of the trip. I'll start with the negatives because, yet again the park shone far more then it failed.- Air breakdown. One of two rides we saw go down over the weekend. Air had a bad day yesterday with one of it's trains going wrong in the first station. Unfortunately thats the side we were in which meant whilst the other side was working fine, we were stuck. Eventually we got on after half an hour and was also given exit passes because of the interruption. Excellent service from the park considering we did get our ride and they didn't really owe us anything.- Busy park. It was a very busy weekend with most rides having full queue-lines. We queued an hour each for Air and Nemesis, half an hour for Oblivion, Rita, Charlie and Mine Train on the Saturday and up to 30 minutes for most rides today. - Pizza and Pasta. A disorganized mess to be honest. There seemed to be no queuing system, you just grabbed what you could and pushed anyone out the way that you could. The pizza wasn't that great either.- Alton Towers hotel bar closes early. Had to make do with Splash Landings bar (Which is still great regardless)And now the pluses+ Despite the long queues the vast majority of staff were excellent. Talkative, friendly, entertaining and understanding. Special shout out goes to a woman at Runaway Mine Train who was utterly awesome. Gave me a special birthday shout out, but even before that she was tlaking to all guests and making everyone laugh. As our last ride of the day, it really made us all happy.+ Oblivion. Far superior ride to Saw. Saw may have a long lay-out but has nowhere near the class or exhilaration of its Northern equivalent. I was with someone who had never been to Alton before and she was terrified of the ride because of the queue-line videos. They do work!+ Nemesis. Just awesome. Best ride in Europe, bar none. + Rita chicken bar. I love this place. The food is gorgeous and cannot fault it.So all in all, an absolutely fantastic visit, yet again. Mine Train, Oblivion and Nemesis were real highlights and are the best rides in the country imo.

Because there are so many June birthdays, I'm just going to say Happy Birthday to everyone basically. June really is the best birthday month.

We all wish we were paid a bit more Will, I'd love to be able to buy my 4 bedroom house with a jacuzzi and swimming pool, tennis court in the back and three running horses for the derby but I'm not encouraging all my work friends to strike with me for it. I'm also not holding the entirety of London up in the sake of selfishness and this is the real bug bear of it all. Striking is causing misery to a hell of a lot of people, the whole point of the tube is to ease congestion on the roads and move people around quickly. Now instead you either have to travel on the awful buses, walk or risk getting knocked over by the buses on bicycle(now that there are 800 more out today those odds are hugely increased). That's if you can even get around because the buses that are on the road will be packed out more then they normally are.Bloody...

Just a few up-dates. You may have noticed a few changes over the last months in the TPM admin/mod team. Basically I left the admin team due to personal reasons, and Jack Dann was added to the admin team to help the moderation. Over this time Marc, Rich and Ian have had a few major changes to their lives which has meant that the forum has suffered a tiny bit when it comes to posts being deleted, member warnings and the like.It is for this reason that I have been re-instated as an admin for a time just to help the others out. Hopefully you'll notice the changes immediately. As a member I noticed the forum slipping so hopefully the old standards will return for a lot of you. Any forum problems, please PM me as I have far more time then the others these days.Thank you for your continued support of TPM

Yes but Loggers moves faster then a Tidal Wave boat. Frankly spraying a slow moving baot with water when said boat already has 20 drenched riders would frankly piss me off immensely.

Ok.. now this rant is going to have some swearing in it. Now normally I do not swear so I apologize to everyone, however this has pissed me off so much and as I have no power to say it in anywhere influential, TPM will have to do.The Tube strikes.You have no idea how much those selfish bastards piss me off. I don't care if you want a 5% pay rise. I don't care if you want your redundancy to be out of choice. You don't hold London to a complete and utter standstill because you greedy ****ers want more money. You are costing London £100 million for the next 48 hours because you take your own concerns above others. Some mums and dads rarely see their kids. They have to leave earlier tomorrow to stand any chance of getting to work, meaning they miss on personal time at home. You are causing un-necessary stress.If I protested at work I'd get fired, many people have been made redundant, I don't see them holding up everyone else's day like you ****s are.GRRR.And relax.

Just don't ride it really is the best advice. Those Intamin rollercoasters are just so evil and painful and vile and just nasty! You don't get any ear bashing from a full 60 seconds on Nemesis or Air whereas Rita and Colossus smack you around less then 10 seconds into the ride.

Yes, but if it said "Exit to the side that you didn't get in the car on", the car would have been in the station by the time it had finished playing.

Relevance to Bubbleworks?I always think its rather nice that Professor Burp, the crazy man that he was, opened a Pop factory in Transylvania. Seem's like the thing a nutty professor would do.

I don't even know if Legoland has fans!

She??! LOL!

I thought that was you!

Oi! I am not that old..

I love Kinder Bueno.Mark fully supports any Kinder sponsorship at Thorpe of any kind. Shove it all over Tidal Wave, that's beyond saving these days!

All rides are currently available. Hoorah.

I totally agree. Inferno is easily my favourite of the Thorpe four and the return of the effects only enhances the ride.

Oh yeah definitly, I didn't mean to imply that Paul was completely wrong. The closest example I can really think of Tussauds genius was really Tidal Wave and Colossus. Colossus is built perfectly around its surroundings, involving non-riders in a way that other companies didn't bother with. Tidal Wave, with WWTP is excellent as it involves a whole area. Those two rides at Thorpe show what Tussauds were capable and it is a kind of shame that Thorpe saw so little of Tussauds excellence.But anyway.. this is a Merlin topic so never mind.

The thing is even when the shoe thing is said guests do not listen so throw them off anyway. When I worked down there, the operators always stopped the train to give guests their shoes back. It's a safety requirement and so attendants should be actively looking out for stray shoes to.

A slight exaggeration,Tussauds only seemed to lose interest towards the end of their days (04 onwards). Before that they still put a hell of a lot of effort into their rides and the guest experience.

That's twice more then the other theme parks in the country.

That sounds exactly how Fastrack begun back in 2002. And to be honest why should Thorpe go around building loads of new single rider pathways to the rides if 1. they are only going to be used by a minority and 2. would cost them quite a bit to do with very little benefit to the park.. unless they charge for the single rider ticket. Oh crap.. I just gave Thorpe an idea..

Marc's been saying that since we started TPM in 2004..

Never.. as the chief person (Marc) has said he has no intention of visiting Chessington again this year, do you really, honestly believe a Chessington mania would actually open. I mean for god sake, TPM hasn't even been updated properly for like 2 months and Marc is there every 4 days!

There are two other permanent top scans in the country. Beast up north and one in Hastings (I believe). The only reason Samurai is so busy is that it's wedged between two major rollercoasters and will feel the brunt of queues if either of them was to break down.