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Lightwater Valley

Just a warning Lightwater is going to be full of school kids this week and they’ve stopped selling tickets online so wouldn’t advise turning up unless you like queues.

Good to see schools still going ahead with visits.
 
Today I visited Lightwater Valley for the first time.

Firstly, The Ultimate is like no other ride I've ever been on. Unbelievably brutal from the 2nd drop onwards. (I'm pretty sure the 1st half is only there to lull riders into a false sense of security.) Riding in the back car, at 4:30pm in 30-degree heat is bloody relentless.

As for the rest of the park... saying we'd done the vast majority of everything we wanted to do by 11.30am could easily sum it up. On a hot day it's nice to relax in the shade of the trees but there's simply not enough there to fill a day. It's during the most of the country's school summer holidays yet the park was extremely quiet. No more than 2 or 3 dispatches wait on The Ultimate all day, despite it running just 1 train all day.

I'm glad I've finally visited, but I can't envision returning.
 
Burbs said:
Today I visited Lightwater Valley for the first time.

Firstly, The Ultimate is like no other ride I've ever been on. Unbelievably brutal from the 2nd drop onwards. (I'm pretty sure the 1st half is only there to lull riders into a false sense of security.) Riding in the back car, at 4:30pm in 30-degree heat is bloody relentless.

As for the rest of the park... saying we'd done the vast majority of everything we wanted to do by 11.30am could easily sum it up. On a hot day it's nice to relax in the shade of the trees but there's simply not enough there to fill a day. It's during the most of the country's school summer holidays yet the park was extremely quiet. No more than 2 or 3 dispatches wait on The Ultimate all day, despite it running just 1 train all day.

I'm glad I've finally visited, but I can't envision returning.
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What did you think of Raptor Attack?
 
Burbs said:
The Ultimate is like no other ride I've ever been on. Unbelievably brutal from the 2nd drop onwards. (I'm pretty sure the 1st half is only there to lull riders into a false sense of security.) Riding in the back car, at 4:30pm in 30-degree heat is bloody relentless.
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It is an absolutely insane roller coaster. Nothing prepares you for the second half. There is a well known trick about crossing your legs as you sit down, which supposedly protects you a bit from the bashing your knees take against the retraint’s bizarre metal casing. I’m not sure it makes a massive difference having tried it. What does make a difference is riding alone if possible, ie late in the day when it’s getting quieter. If you’re with a mate, take a row each and you can really spread your knees out, minimising said knee bashing. I say minimising as it’s virtually impossible not to get bashed at some point during the second half of the ride. I’m really tempted to put knee pads on next time I ride it! Also I can’t remember which side @rob666 can you? But apparently one side of the train has more leg room than the other

I was lucky enough to have half a dozen rides on it the other week and really wanted to try the front & back rows as on the previous visit I just sat round the middle. To me the front was more brutal than I expected though you do get the great views. Ended up having about 3 goes at the back and am convinced that’s bizarrely the LEAST vicious place to sit on that beast of a train. We talked to the staff about it; at the front, despite barely moving until you’re halfway down the main drops, you then get pushed around the rest of the way. At the back you get pulled around by the rest of the train but the effect is less than that of the back row on other coasters somehow. Because the train is so ridiculously long, the middle is kind of caught in the tension of the two extremes so doesn’t really know what it’s doing. This may sound silly but having now had numerous rides front, middle and back, I prefer the back out of them all easily!
 
The Ultimate is such a great roller coaster, I absolutely love it. A prime example of a ride we should be proud of, it's so different to anything else I've been on and something that could never be recreated in modern times.

The front is definitely the most brutal, in my experience. We were able to stay in the front carriage for a few rides in a row last year, absolutely brilliant.
 
I got over The Ultimate 9 years ago. We had an ERT and I got bruising over my legs, making work a challenge in the following days. When I rode in 2018, it was on one train with a 4 or 5 train wait. Needless to say we left the park by 1pm.



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Coaster said:
The Ultimate is such a great roller coaster, I absolutely love it. A prime example of a ride we should be proud of, it's so different to anything else I've been on and something that could never be recreated in modern times.

The front is definitely the most brutal, in my experience. We were able to stay in the front carriage for a few rides in a row last year, absolutely brilliant.
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How on earth did you manage that?! :eek:
 
I don't think proud is the right term to use about the Ultimate, since the ridiculous nature of it came about by pure luck and poor planning as opposed to it meaning to be completely utterly mental...
 
Is The Ultimate an example of a ride that's "so bad it's good" so to speak? The raw brutality of it doesn't sound like it would appeal to me at all, although I'd like to try it for the experience!
 
This is a bit off topic, but as well as being a very long roller coaster, The Ultimate also unusually long trains that carry 40 riders. I was wondering whether there are any roller coasters out there with more than 40 seats? Which roller coaster has the biggest/longest trains?

Like Speedy, I’m not really into the ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ thing. For me it’s a great terrain coaster, with a good variety between the hills in the first section and the twisty second half. The second half of the ride is wilder than the first, and that’s how it should be, otherwise it’d be anticlimactic if you had the wilder half first. For me The Ultimate does a lot of things a top coaster should without feeling formulaic. It would be better if it were smoother, but it’s still a genuinely class ride.
 
Usually, the rides with long trains are the ones that attract nudists trying to set pountless and unnecessary records. Oddly, they've not tried it on Ulty, as far as I know. Can't think why.

I'm not going to ask why you wanted to know. ;)
 
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