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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

We popped to chessie on Friday to check our the Gruffalo, I certainly wouldn't want to queue in all it's extensions! But it was a good ride and so much better than Bubbleworks for the past 5 years or so. I was expecting another Charlie in the chocolate factory, but this has plenty of 3D theming, good lighting and lots of smells throughout. The ending was probably also much nicer than Bubbleworks past few years. The station is also nice and the staff even have themed uniform!

One thing that's annoying, the queue line moved pretty slow but this was purely for the queue line photo point just outside the station. Once we got past that the whole station was empty and we pretty much just walked on.
 
I enjoyed Chesvegas at the weekend, however it suffers an issue some parks (notably BPB) suffer, saturation. At 12 we sat for food and I stayed sat until 4 except for going to a shop or hitting the bar. I love rides as people probably know but it was saturated in the park with everything worth riding having a long queue as they have either poor ops, poor design or both. Rattlesnake was 1:16 per dispatch and 3 adults per car, so under 200pph, Fury was on 100pph and Vampire lacks station kickers so takes a while to park and they have killed throughput by only 2 trains. Scorpion Express probably was the only decent one as much as it could be.

Outside of coasters, Dragon Falls had an hour queue, Kobra is terrible for throughput, and Tomb Blaster took an age to load ( and is awful inside)

I am annoyed with Towers running Smiler on 3 but it is a throughput machine compared to anything at CWOA. Spinball Whizzer probably had more throughput than Vampire, Fury and Rattlesnake combined
 
Chessington need to remove Dragon's Fury and put in a coaster that can actually handle guests. I quite like the ride but with current operation procedures it is nowhere near suitable for Chessington. When we were there last weekend the main queue was hardly long, I've queued about 20 minutes for that length in the past, yet the queue time was between 2 and 3 hours. We queued 50 minutes in the fastrack queue. With 3 per car if you were lucky it was getting around 100pph. Shocking.

I'm afraid unless Chessington can operate it like a normal coaster then it has to go. It is a misery.

In other news the Smokehouse at Chessington is brilliant and I was impressed with the selection of craft beers.

:)
 
Chessington have a ride that can do throughput but instead choose to run it badly and have removed a train. The park is full of plenty of rubbish rides that need flattening but Fury isn't one of them, it is their best ride
 
Last time we were there they were running one empty cars to one full, granted there was nobody there and they let us stay on three times in a row, but it was an absolute shambles. They made us wait on the scales until the previous occupants of the car had exited the station, this then required them to stop the car in the station while they measured my son who anybody with more than one eye could see far exceeded the minimum height, only then were we allowed onto the platform and got in the car, where three seperate people then checked our restraints one after the other as we slowly tooled through the station, we then sat there for what felt like an eternity while the ride ops chatted about The Voice. Eventually, they sent us on our way, I assumed they were waiting for a block to open. A ride op told me last year they now had to keep one clear block between cars.

When we got back to the station after the third go we hopped out and run around to join the queue at the station steps, half our later we gave up waiting and went home.

Most Surrey schools have gone back today yet it's presently a 70 minute queue.... (School trips don't usually start until May).
 
How many cars does it even run now? Used to be 7 (8 cars caused big problems when it first opened, which was hilarious as you could dispatch cars before they got to the first block)...

Everything at Chessie has lost throughput... Vampire 3 trains, Rattle snake has been affected, Tomb probably doesn't run 5 trains... Factor in Fastrack on everything and it's run probably the worst out of all Merlin parks...
 
Jamie said:
Out of interest, does anyone know the reason for such terrible operations on Fury?
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Last year I was told that after Smiler Merlin mandated there must be an extra clear block between cars on Fury and Rattlesnake.

In answer to the other question it was four cars two weeks ago, but is probably different now.

TedTheHuman said:
Where is it Mike?
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I can answer that, top of the second "lift hill" if you can call it that, before the fountains room, the camera is on a shelf facing you as you go down the ramp and the photo is taken just after you start going down (you eventually go under the camera) we had about 10 seconds stopped at the top to all shuffle round the other side of the boat to get a decent photo, was funny.
 
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IanSR said:
Most Surrey schools have gone back today yet it's presently a 70 minute queue.... (School trips don't usually start until May).
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I'm not sure how relevant Surrey schools are anymore, the park has been pulling guests from all over the place and I imagine the new hotel and Gruf is only going to mean that out of county guests will continue to increase as a percentage.
 
True, Thorpe's queues were sky high today too, Paulton's as well but then they're in Hampshire and their schools are still off.
 
Queue times are almost always long at Chessington unless there's practically no-one there as none of their rides are currently capable of high throughput, mostly due to self-imposed operational procedures slowing things down. Obviously safety is important but when one of the park's headline attractions is only capable of getting through 100-200 per hour then things need urgent attention. With Fury often loading only 3 per car due to weight restrictions, 1 out of every 2 to 3 cars being given over to special access band holders and a 50-50 split of what's left between fastrack and main queue you're looking at a main-queue throughput of 50 per hour or even less which is abysmal.

Vampire on the other hand seems slightly better this year as the new exit gates have eased the bottleneck on the exit platform resulting in slightly faster loading.
 
It's one car only for RAP on Fury (or was the other week) which has on occasions made the RAP queue longer than the main queue, plus it's mixed with SRQ which has made the whole procedure a complete mess.

Also doesn't help when one particular Fury staff member has no problem expressing his disdane at RAP users directly with comments such as "you'll get on when I want to let you on" (in response to being asked why he had held the RAP queue for half an hour) and "if you can't queue you shouldn't have come to a theme park", not the kind of thing you want being said to children full stop let alone kids who have really obvious disabilities.
 
No, he really doesn't... I'd hope that those who he interacted with in that manner complained, because quite frankly if you're gonna be acting like that you shouldn't be working in a guest facing role...

Why should people who genuinely suffer from something which prevents standing in a confined queueline for long periods not visit a theme park Diogo?
 
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