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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

Thameslink Rail said:
Good point, especially if they want to build a 3rd runway. Would they have to put beacons on the top like Blackpool did with the Big One?
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I'd assume so. There's a reason why so many tall buildings have to have beacons on the top. It's especially prominent in London near City Airport, and on some buildings in central London which are on the flight path to Heathrow. There must be something where structures over a certain height have to have a beacon on them by law.
 
Jonathan said:
I'd assume so. There's a reason why so many tall buildings have to have beacons on the top. It's especially prominent in London near City Airport, and on some buildings in central London which are on the flight path to Heathrow. There must be something where structures over a certain height have to have a beacon on them by law.
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London City Airport is a special case because the planes that use it are generally smaller Bombardier/Embraer aircraft coming in at a much larger angle than usual 5.5 degrees instead of the usual 3 degrees to avoid the skyscrapers.
 
Jonathan said:
I'd assume so. There's a reason why so many tall buildings have to have beacons on the top. It's especially prominent in London near City Airport, and on some buildings in central London which are on the flight path to Heathrow. There must be something where structures over a certain height have to have a beacon on them by law.
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I know the US does because the Hollywood Tower of Terror was built lust under the minimum height as the designers felt a beacon would ruin the look of the building.
 
Bert2theSpark said:
In all fairness, Swarm wasn't an initial success because of external factors such as the Olympics. The product itself is popular, reliable and the Brave it Backwards campaign in 2013 shows that the ride did captivate the interests of the public.


I mean this is the era in which Merlin's CEO is supposedly on record for saying "Alton Towers will never get a wooden coaster", and look what happened. If as Matt's book mentions that a B&M hyper is technically feasible at Thorpe Park, they could easily find a way to market a hyper coaster especially if they place the USP on the theme and experience of the ride rather than breaking records. Or hell even pull a Cedar Fair and make the USP true but very oddly specific, it still gives them a gimmick to market. If the park offer a solid product, the marketing team can always find ways to market as a USP (not the other way round). Word of Mouth marketing is very strong and is undoubtedly one of the reasons Wicker Man is so popular.
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Loads of people blamed the Olympics though, Camelot said that's the reason why they closed permanently! Interesting to know about the Hyper Coaster but honestly I still think a GCI would fit at Thorpe very nicely!
 
The Olympics of course bought in a lot of people to London, but they were in East London and had travelled (and paid a lot of money) specifically to watch the games. They weren’t there to travel to Surrey to visit a regional theme park.

In fact a lot of traditional tourism suffered in summer 2012 because people who weren’t visiting the Olympics stayed away and those that were visiting for the Olympics pretty much stayed at the venues only.

Here is an article that covered it at the time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ourism-struggles-during-olympics-7994159.html
 
Without seeing the plans it’s hard to know how good the hypercoaster would have been. It is tempting to look at never built rides with a sense of wistfulness. However, B&M hypercoasters are very practical rides. The clamshell restraints don’t have seat belts, unlike B&M’s other coasters, so they’re very quick to check. Although The Swarm has the baggage room, you’ve still got the problem that the people coming off the ride get in the way of the people boarding, which limits the effectiveness of the baggage room.

A B&M hypercoaster would have had a higher throughput with fewer staff. It does seem to be the Merlin way to go for the lower throughput, staff intensive option. I don’t think the Swarm’s a bad ride and it is well themed, but an airtime machine would have been more my kind of thing.

Even if you ignore last year, which was difficult for every park, Thorpe Park’s guest feedback has been falling. On Trip Advisor it only gets 3.5 stars now, which is pretty poor. The poor feedback is chiefly down to the queues, rather than the quality of their coasters. If Thorpe Park wants to raise their attendance, tackling the long queues would probably have to be the first task.
 
If I was given the goal of increasing Thorpe's capacity I would do the following:
Remove DBGT and use the warehouse for a large scale dark ride possibly using the Duel car system.
Ensure that rollercoasters have all their trains running (looking at you Colossus).
Fill in the gaps where rides have been removed recently (Loggers Leap, Slammer, Saw Alive, I'm a Celeb).
Edit: ensure that rides at the back of the park e.g. Rumba Rapids are ready at 10 instead of staggering them.
Allow guests to get to their first ride from 9:45 so rides are ready to go at 10.
 
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Thameslink Rail said:
Remove DBGT and use the warehouse for a large scale dark ride possibly using the Duel car system.
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It's always interesting how often people say things like "remove this dark ride, and use the warehouse for a different dark ride!" - it should be remembered that these 'warehouses' are almost always specifically designed around the ride, suiting the requirements of the ride.

If you were to replace the ride, demolishing and rebuilding the whole facility would be more cost effective.
 
I'd quite happily bulldoze DBGT and start again TBH. A classic example of Merlin not thinking about the operational aspects of a ride and only thinking about marketing the thing.

I've long felt Thorpe's biggest issue is queue times, partially down to the over-abundance of FT, partially down to being stuck with rides with mediocre throughput (Saw, Colossus) and partially due to rubbish operations on Inferno (seriously, why is that thing always so badly operated these days?). If they maxed-out capacities on everything they already have they'd be half-way there, but the small cars on Saw and terrible trains/station layout on Colossus are always going to limit what they can get out of them

I suspect that, prior to the bag store closing, Swarm would generally be the highest throughput coaster in the park by a considerable margin. I'm not sure how much of impact the loss of baggage store has made as I don't visit that often anymore but I'd guess that as people just dump their stuff between the loading bays it's probably far less significant than on Thirteen/Smiler. A well-run B&M hyper would have had higher throughput, but swapping out Swarm for a hyper wouldn't have solved the underlying problems in the rest of the park, though I guess if it had been a bigger hit with the public it could have drawn more people away from the other rides.
 
Matt N said:
what do you guys think would have happened at Thorpe had the great fire of 2000 not happened?

Personally, I think that the park’s thrilling transition would likely have happened far more slowly, and possibly not to quite the same degree; I think the park would almost have become more like the Alton Towers of the South as opposed to the out-and-out thrill park they ended up becoming.
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I think the issue of Merlin competing with themselves for the same market in the south with Chessington, and to a lesser extent Lego, would always have resulted in the thrill path being followed. The fire, the success of the 3 thrill flats as last minute substitutes, and the loss of the mill and WWH certainly sped that process up but I'm pretty certain we'd have ended up in a similar place by now regardless.
 
For me the three main reasons why I am in no rush to return to Thorpe Park are:

1. The state of the place - rides need painting, theming needs restoring etc.
2. The clientele - it’s meant to be a fun day out and having to deal with queue jumping, swearing, shouting, spitting etc isn’t my idea of fun.
3. Operations - standing looking at the dilapidated theming whilst surrounded by the delightful guests is made worse because of the generally poor operations.

Add to that the lack of anything particularly exciting when it comes to new additions and I am I happy to spend my money and time elsewhere.
 
John said:
I'd quite happily bulldoze DBGT and start again TBH. A classic example of Merlin not thinking about the operational aspects of a ride and only thinking about marketing the thing.

I've long felt Thorpe's biggest issue is queue times, partially down to the over-abundance of FT, partially down to being stuck with rides with mediocre throughput (Saw, Colossus) and partially due to rubbish operations on Inferno (seriously, why is that thing always so badly operated these days?). If they maxed-out capacities on everything they already have they'd be half-way there, but the small cars on Saw and terrible trains/station layout on Colossus are always going to limit what they can get out of them

I suspect that, prior to the bag store closing, Swarm would generally be the highest throughput coaster in the park by a considerable margin. I'm not sure how much of impact the loss of baggage store has made as I don't visit that often anymore but I'd guess that as people just dump their stuff between the loading bays it's probably far less significant than on Thirteen/Smiler. A well-run B&M hyper would have had higher throughput, but swapping out Swarm for a hyper wouldn't have solved the underlying problems in the rest of the park, though I guess if it had been a bigger hit with the public it could have drawn more people away from the other rides.
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The question is will DBGT ever open again, i mean i hope it doesn't becuase it's novelty dropped off and it was extremely hit and miss but i doubt they'll bulldoze it completely!
 
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