Now that I'm home with some time, here's a full account of what we experienced with Valhalla over 3 days during the bank holiday weekend.
Valhalla broke down constantly over the weekend; it was going down almost every 10 minutes. On Saturday, the ride was evacuated just after opening, taking another half an hour to properly open. Then in the afternoon, the entire queue line was evacuated however the ride did re-open later on. On Sunday, the ride and queue were evacuated at around 1:30pm and the ride did not re-open. It then opened well past 1pm on Monday despite being advertised as 12 noon.
Before this refurbishment Valhalla opened at 11am consistently, after a massive investment in time and money, is it not reasonable to expect it to open earlier than it used to? The whole point of this was to improve things, not make them worse!
We experienced a concerning boat bump on the Saturday evening, with 3 boats all bumped into each other just after the ice room. Surely after a £4 million pound upgrade, the block system should not allow this to happen. Whilst we knew there was no danger, the riders in front of us were very worried and had their first ever ride ruined. On some of our other rides on it, the boat bounced around like a bucking bronco and almost jammed on some of the corners.
On Monday, they were holding boats in the station and staggering how often they were dispatched, which seemed to reduce the number of breakdowns, but it made the low throughput even worse to the point where the queue hardly moved at all.
Speedy Pass is also throttling the ride’s capacity. This should not be a feature on the ride until the reliability and throughput has been sorted – Easy Pass is needed, but Speedy Pass should only be introduced once the ride is running properly.
Effects were as unreliable as ever; no hammers or rolling log during the weekend, then working on Monday, fire not working properly, audio broken in the turntable scene on one ride, fire exits and evacuation lights left open/on, and the warehouse seemed lighter than ever which highlighted all the workings. The steam room was turning off as we got to it, making it much less impressive than before. The new ghost scene just before the last drop has had a new strobe added which lights up all the workings, this looked better during technical rehearsals.
As a result of our experiences over the weekend, my question is, where did the time and money go?
After waiting 3.5 years for Valhalla to re-open, and after an investment of £4 million pounds, a reasonable expectation is for it to run reliably and with a higher throughput than when it closed. I would also expect the effects to work – we were promised the ring of fire which worked on the media day, but I have not seen this working even once since the re-imagined Valhalla opened. This is not good enough, it needs to work for every ride, not just for the press.
Given everything that we have experienced above, my overall impression of the re-imagined Valhalla is that it was a complete waste of money and the ride should have been ripped out and replaced. Every single problem that it had prior to closing in 2019 is not only still present, but worse than it ever was before.
