• ℹ️ Heads up...

    This is a popular topic that is fast moving Guest - before posting, please ensure that you check out the first post in the topic for a quick reminder of guidelines, and importantly a summary of the known facts and information so far. Thanks.

Drayton Manor Park

Enter Valhalla said:
How can Plopsaland Belgium have a start day of new season when they’re open every weekend of the year? They are not a seasonal theme park anymore, so to compare them to Drayton Manor is not a fair comparison.
Click to expand...

Plopsaland Belgium closes for all of January after Christmas and reopens for weekends and select weekdays from mid February. This has been the case since the start of the 2025 so technically one could consider Feb 14th the start of their season this year... but then Drayton Manor were technically open in February half term too.

Plopsaland themselves promoted March 21st as the Grand Opening day of the season as per the link below.

I'm not sure when Plopsaland began offering a full ride line-up but i'd be surprised if all rides were operating in February, though that would be as much down to the weather affecting availability. The ride closure calendar isn't accessible retrospectively but certainly everything seemed ready by their stated Grand Opening date, which was not the case at Drayton.

It's a relatively short window where they are fully closed but from September till March they're rarely open all week, so they're arguably more comparable to Paultons or Legoland in the UK but the calendar does now seem broadly similar to Drayton Manor.

www.plopsanews.com

Plopsaland opens new season with Grand Opening and looks ambitiously to the future | Plopsa News

www.plopsanews.com www.plopsanews.com
 
The problem Drayton put on themselves was closing for 3 weeks after the main season to get the park ready for the Christmas event. Then the park was open to the 3rd Jan. Usually by then the Maintenance staff will have worked on the Adventure Cove rides and the other rides not open for the Christmas event. Then the park gave all members of staff 2 weeks off so they only had 4 weeks to get the rides open for the Feb half term event and the 3 rides in the main park so they only been working on the main park rides for the past 6 weeks and thats the reason they fallen behind in the maintenance schedule. They need to look at how Paulton’s do there maintenance schedule with 3 rides closed at a time so the maintenance is done all year and you still can offer an excellent ride lineup.
As for future plans currently the Excalibur lake has been totally been drained. You can see all the turntables is still in place. Now I know the ride wont ever come back as they make a fortune out of the Halloween and Christmas event but they could be planning on removing the old theming.
Other improvements the Haunting got new speakers in the trailer so you can hear the Pre show video clearly now. The library room has also had a new smoke machine installed in the room so the room was full of smoke. They also added new lightening and the Projector is now 4K.
 
We went on Saturday and as much as it was a fun day, Operations were not good and Im genuinely wondering if this is normal for DM. So if anyone goes regularly please let us know if this is indeed normal for DM or we just had a bad day.

-Bounty around 4 minutes to load and dispatch
-Gold Rush on one train (1 to 2 cars assigned for FT and EAP) 5 Minutes to load and dispatch
-The Haunting (Advertised on the signs as 15 minutes between "shows") Waited 25 minutes and we was at the front of the queue.
-Maelstrom only filling half the seats (decided not to ride)
-Loki only filling half of the seats (8 seats assigned to FT and EAP) 6 Minutes to load and begin cycle. Gave up when we saw this and exited the queue.
-Thor (14 seats assigned to FT And EAP) before loading the rest of the seats, 9 minutes to load and begin cycle
-River Rapids (seemed to be a free for all for FT and EAP Line)most we saw to a boat was the group you come as so no different to Towers but due to the stopping of the deck every time someone was boarding slowed down operations.
-The Wave (2 to 3 rows assigned for FT and EAP) 7 Minutes to load and dispatch.
-Jormungandr I think thats what it was called was closed, as was Storm Force and Air Race.

Other things we thought a bit odd were the minimal queue boards and that the rides as far as we could see didn't have queue times at the front of each attraction.
Credit where its due, we did have some "problem guests" who left The Wave queue line as the Rapids was having evac and The Wave can't operate when the evac is happening below, And came back through the fast track line demanding to be let on. Which made them stop the ride until security had arrived which I will say was handled quickly but I really felt for the stations staff as they were getting alot of abuse.
Other than that issue like I said we did enjoy the park but it felt like the staff across certain attractions didn't have speed in the processes. Maybe they are trained this way but it does impact on the day.
 
Draytons problem has been operations, certainly for the last few years. It's something they really need to work on and even if they have a solid ride offering they struggle the lack of high capacity rides. The park really need to take this into account with future investments. Buying a second train for the Wave would help, and you know maybe some sort of high throughput dark ride...... Just a thought
 
Last edited:
For clarity, when you say “load and dispatch”; are we talking 7 minutes (in The Wave’s case, for example) between dispatches (so including the time it takes for the ride to cycle)? Or 7 minutes parked in the station?

Neither is particularly great, but 7 minutes between dispatches is not quite as terrible as 7 minutes parked in the station (which sounds, to be frank, absolutely woeful)!
 
Matt N said:
For clarity, when you say “load and dispatch”; are we talking 7 minutes (in The Wave’s case, for example) between dispatches (so including the time it takes for the ride to cycle)? Or 7 minutes parked in the station?

Neither is particularly great, but 7 minutes between dispatches is not quite as terrible as 7 minutes parked in the station (which sounds, to be frank, absolutely woeful)!
Click to expand...
The 7 minutes was from the ride entering the station to the next dispatch
 
Ripsaw97 said:
The 7 minutes was from the ride entering the station to the next dispatch
Click to expand...
Wow, that really isn’t great… when you take into account the ride cycle time, you’re not a million miles off 10 minutes between dispatches!
 
Matt N said:
Wow, that really isn’t great… when you take into account the ride cycle time, you’re not a million miles off 10 minutes between dispatches!
Click to expand...

Or potentially not much over 144pph!

It’s been really poor on all our visits. My wife refuses to even go anymore, it’s easily her least favourite theme park that we’ve dragged her to.

At this point they’d have to build something pretty special for us to go back. I think it’s fine and our visits were good but it’s not really any better than visiting our local amusement park overall.
 
Matt N said:
For clarity, when you say “load and dispatch”; are we talking 7 minutes (in The Wave’s case, for example) between dispatches (so including the time it takes for the ride to cycle)? Or 7 minutes parked in the station?

Neither is particularly great, but 7 minutes between dispatches is not quite as terrible as 7 minutes parked in the station (which sounds, to be frank, absolutely woeful)!
Click to expand...
It seriously needs sorting out and they've had two full seasons to do it for the Wave

What kills it definitely seems to be the restraint system where they need staff to pull it down and check, otherwise it breaks down...
 
The Wave baffles me. Or more specifically, the faffiness of its operation baffles me.

When the ride had standup trains, I could to a degree understand the operational difficulty, as those can be a bit of a faff to get right. But the ride now has sit-down trains with a simple lap bar, which should be the easiest trains in the world to get a good throughput out of, yet gets a worse throughput than it did before.
 
Ripsaw97 said:
-Bounty around 4 minutes to load and dispatch
-Gold Rush on one train (1 to 2 cars assigned for FT and EAP) 5 Minutes to load and dispatch
-The Haunting (Advertised on the signs as 15 minutes between "shows") Waited 25 minutes and we was at the front of the queue.
-Maelstrom only filling half the seats (decided not to ride)
-Loki only filling half of the seats (8 seats assigned to FT and EAP) 6 Minutes to load and begin cycle. Gave up when we saw this and exited the queue.
-Thor (14 seats assigned to FT And EAP) before loading the rest of the seats, 9 minutes to load and begin cycle
-River Rapids (seemed to be a free for all for FT and EAP Line)most we saw to a boat was the group you come as so no different to Towers but due to the stopping of the deck every time someone was boarding slowed down operations.
-The Wave (2 to 3 rows assigned for FT and EAP) 7 Minutes to load and dispatch.
-Jormungandr I think thats what it was called was closed, as was Storm Force and Air Race.
Click to expand...
why are all the dispatches so long, 5 mins for gold rush,

what are the ops doing it is a new intimin, surely it should be open gates, mess with bags (I don't know what Drayton's bag policy is) then walk down and check the restraints and dispatch perhaps the odd dispatch at 5 mins for issues (guest, seat sensor, etc) but is that constant as it seems very long.
 
flyingguitar said:
why are all the dispatches so long, 5 mins for gold rush,

what are the ops doing it is a new intimin, surely it should be open gates, mess with bags (I don't know what Drayton's bag policy is) then walk down and check the restraints and dispatch perhaps the odd dispatch at 5 mins for issues (guest, seat sensor, etc) but is that constant as it seems very long.
Click to expand...
that was consistently how long it took from the train arriving to loading,bags ,bars down and dispatch. 5 minutes was the average but there were times when it was longer. One of the issues we saw was that they dont allow the train to be filled until all the guests were out beyond the exit barrier. I know it sounds sad but there wasn't much else to do in the outside section of the queue than to time to train dispatch lol. But we thought the same with it being a new intamin that things would be quicker.
 
Ripsaw97 said:
that was consistently how long it took from the train arriving to loading,bags ,bars down and dispatch. 5 minutes was the average but there were times when it was longer. One of the issues we saw was that they dont allow the train to be filled until all the guests were out beyond the exit barrier. I know it sounds sad but there wasn't much else to do in the outside section of the queue than to time to train dispatch lol. But we thought the same with it being a new intamin that things would be quicker.
Click to expand...
I think the lack of overlap with exiting and entering guests is definatly a problem,

but you are talking about like 3-4 times what towers takes (with the exception of galactica which has its own problems) at worst you would expect it to be twice the amount (assuming unloading takes the whole dispatch time, which it can with slower guests)

what is the baggage bays like, are they like oblivion or 13 where they are off to one side of the ride creating a mini traffic jam or are they properly distributed like the smiler?

also how quick were the ride crew, some ridea at AT like the wickerman they practically run down the train.

I wonder if there is much to motivate the staff to get high throughputs, I know on a lot of merlins rides, they have a system for checking the number of seats filled each dispatch, and then calculating the throughput. I am not sure what merlin dose with the throughput numbers, but at the very least it can give a number the ride crew can strive towards
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top