Blackpool Pleasure Beach: General Discussion

[Rick]

@Rick some of us think throughput is a serious concern, and @Jamie isn't the only one here to think so either. BPB's ride capacity collapses in the face of Towers, which also means they will struggle with any large amount of people. As stated, some rides are held by H&S, but others by fixable problems which aren't sorted.

It's not that I don't think they're not important, you just have to take a realistic view of things. You can suggest that it 'collapses', but realistically the attendance is completely different, not to mention the profile of it. Alton have previously received 20% of their annual attendance in a single weekend with fireworks - that's nuts when you think about it.

Some things could certainly be improved without H&S issues, but most invoke a cost and it's a balancing act as far as where the money goes to.

The best solution would be to replace the old, outdated and proven rubbish arrow control system with a newer system with adjustable magnetic brakes on the MCBR and final brake runs.

But like John says, it's not going to happen

Two points, I'm not sure you could retrofit magnetic brakes onto the Big One, if only because there is so much lateral play in the trains. Maybe you could, I'm not sure - I don't think it's been done before? Did Titan get new brakes, or just new trains?

Secondly, the park are going to have to spend some serious money on the that ride in the not too distant future if it is going to be around for the long run and although I am no fan of that ride, it certainly has to be doesn't it - in some form or another.

Also what track clamps on it?

The ones on (almost) every support on the ride.

But surely the ride system has been programmed to E-stop because the train is travelling too fast around the track? Therefore adding trims wouldn't be an option as it could be a danger to allow it to travel too fast.

The problem with the PLC on Big One is that it doesn't take into account the varying speeds caused by the wind at Blackpool. Pleasure Beach's solution to that is to run the trains with varying compounds to try and maintain roughly the same cycle times, irrespective of what the wind is doing.

 

[Poisson]

Never really looked for the clamps, I am usually too busy laughing at the supports if I look at them

 

[Enter Valhalla]

Going back to the capacity issues, it frankly baffles me that anyone can put BPB's shambolic operations in the same category as the way Thorpe Park do things.

Thorpe Park have proper merge points for fastrack ticket holders rather than at BPB where I frequently see Speedy Pass people put in seats where people are already waiting in the gates, often on more than one train in a row causing people to get really angry.

Most of Thorpe's coasters have throughputs of around 1000 per hour and achieve close to this on busy days, BPB coasters are lucky to get 500 and that's without the faff of Speedy Pass, not to mention the fact that the park frequently seem to run coasters on way less trains/ cars than they are capable of.

Yes Thorpe do occasionally have issues with running coasters on one train but, believe me, running a coaster on one train isn't a decision which Thorpe take lightly at busy periods. This will usually be because of issues with the other train, lack of staff etc and this year they've been better with it anyway.

BPB just seems to implement Soeedy Pass in a very unprofessional and disorganised way. Thorpe have issues with capacity on occasions but let's not forget that they get probably four times the amount of visitors that BPB get and yet it still feels like a much more professional operations despite some of its flaws. BPB get lower gate figures than Merlin parks yet seem incapable of coping when numbers are anything even slightly higher than average.

 

[Rick]

Track clamp:


Best support:

 

[Coaster]

Going back to the capacity issues, it frankly baffles me that anyone can put BPB's shambolic operations in the same category as the way Thorpe Park do things.

Thorpe Park have proper merge points for fastrack ticket holders rather than at BPB where I frequently see Speedy Pass people put in seats where people are already waiting in the gates, often on more than one train in a row causing people to get really angry.

I'm not going to dispute that at all, the way Speedy Pass is implemented is awful, not least through stealing people's seats but also because it seriously slows down operations of the coasters as they load them onto the trains before they open the airgates.

Most of Thorpe's coasters have throughputs of around 1000 per hour and achieve close to this on busy days, BPB coasters are lucky to get 500 and that's without the faff of Speedy Pass, not to mention the fact that the park frequently seem to run coasters on way less trains/ cars than they are capable of.

Yes Thorpe do occasionally have issues with running coasters on one train but, believe me, running a coaster on one train isn't a decision which Thorpe take lightly at busy periods. This will usually be because of issues with the other train, lack of staff etc and this year they've been better with it anyway.

Thorpe reguarly run coasters on one train during busy times, I have seen it occur more times than I can remember this year, X has also regularly been on just two trains - not sure it's ever run less than three before this year!
BPB has been the same this year unfortunately, something which has not been the case in the past.

BPB just seems to implement Soeedy Pass in a very unprofessional and disorganised way. Thorpe have issues with capacity on occasions but let's not forget that they get probably four times the amount of visitors that BPB get and yet it still feels like a much more professional operations despite some of its flaws. BPB get lower gate figures than Merlin parks yet seem incapable of coping when numbers are anything even slightly higher than average.

To be honest I don't think that either park are good at coping with numbers, which is a shame as they are both capable of it.

 

[Dar]

But surely the ride system has been programmed to E-stop because the train is travelling too fast around the track? Therefore adding trims wouldn't be an option as it could be a danger to allow it to travel too fast.

That's only a guess though.

As far as I understand it, there is no "too fast" for the track it's simply that the brakes are naff and might not be able to stop the train. The brakes only have a certain number of fixed pressures they can apply, because Arrow, and that means they might not be able to slow a train.

Most of the problems on PMBO can be boiled down to "Arrow

Two points, I'm not sure you could retrofit magnetic brakes onto the Big One, if only because there is so much lateral play in the trains. Maybe you could, I'm not sure - I don't think it's been done before? Did Titan get new brakes, or just new trains?

I'm not sure, although I can't see it being *too* much of an issue if they were a straight swap for the ones already on the MCBR?

Secondly, the park are going to have to spend some serious money on the that ride in the not too distant future if it is going to be around for the long run and although I am no fan of that ride, it certainly has to be doesn't it - in some form or another.

Absolutely, they got a deal off Arrow at the time and now they're left with a massive elephant in the room. It needs work, the trains are awful, they can't get rid without losing a large number of guests, they can't afford to replace it with something more modern, so they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Which is a shame because on a good day, PMBO is a really fun ride and it would be a shame to see it rot.

 

[Coaster]

PMBO has lots of work done to it every winter, what extra work does it need doing?

 

[Cheese]

Well, ideally it needs someone like Chance Morgan to come in and do a Phantom's Revenge-style rework, reprofiling the track that's wrong (bringing some airtime in the process), replacing the rolling stock and implementing a control system that can deal with Blackpool's climate. The result? A more comfortable, more reliable, higher throughput coaster that's also finally worth riding.

 

[Rick]

As far as I understand it, there is no "too fast" for the track it's simply that the brakes are naff and might not be able to stop the train. The brakes only have a certain number of fixed pressures they can apply, because Arrow, and that means they might not be able to slow a train.

The PLC has timings built into it to ensure the ride is running as is intended - it's a safeguard to ensure that a ride isn't modified to operate outside of the designer's/manufacturer's tolerances. I think you have misunderstood how brakes work on an Arrow coaster! They're not as complicated as you describe.

Most of the problems on PMBO can be boiled down to Arrow.

Absolutely, they got a deal off Arrow at the time and now they're left with a massive elephant in the room. It needs work, the trains are awful, they can't get rid without losing a large number of guests, they can't afford to replace it withsomething more modern, so they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Which is a shame because on a good day, PMBO is a really fun ride and it would be a shame to see it rot.

I think it's easy to demonise Arrow in this instance and 'blame' them, but if you really look back over the past 30 years or so, that's not really the case. It was hardly them getting a 'deal'.

PMBO came out of GT riding Magnum, a very celebrated ride (but not without its technical difficulties 26 years on...). Pleasure Beach approached Arrow in 1990 to build the ride, who else were they going to approach? Intamin had built a couple of Bobsleds and a few mad stand-ups, B&M's first ride was still in the factory, Vekoma had just built Goudurix, Schwartzkopf were in bankruptcy (again) and Mack didn't build anything along the lines of what the park wanted. The only company building rides approaching that magnitude was Togo

If you think of it as a mobile phone - when I show the kids my handsets from the 1990s they sneer and laugh at how basic they are and can't wait to tell me how much better their Apple 6S is... which is true. I then explain that these were the best phones on the market when I bought them and it's only because they have the advancements of the past 20 years in their heads, that they compare as they do. It's the exact same situation as this, the difference of course is that my Nokia 5110 and Motorola MR201 live in a drawer yet the roller coaster in question - all £12m of it (£22m in 2015) stands proudly on the front at Blackpool.

Arrow were pioneers in this industry and are largely responsible for the bulk of what was produced by other companies such as Intamin, B&M etc through the 1990s to the present day. Hindsight is always 20/20 but The Big One was a pioneering ride - it's a product of its day though, for sure.

 

[Plastic Person]

Great post, Rick. Saying that, PBMO was still built on the cheap in some ways. The 45 degree angles of the gently undulating drops (more comparable to ramps), are to give the ride it's iconic visual impact, but also acted as a way of saving steel. The Thompsons wanted a ride like Magnum, but beyond the excellent first drop, it's not built to do anything of the sort. Enthusiasts, myself included, remember PBB/BPB's days as a world leading park fondly, but unlike his relatives who have learned a lesson, old GT wasn't averse to cutting more than the odd corner here and there...

In regards to capacity, yes, it's something PBB need to focus on. The park always had better customer service than many gave it credit for, but the upside of the drought of investment this past decade is that the park now depend on a stronger visitor experience, and capacity is a large part of that.

 

[Rick]

@Plastic Person - that's true in some ways, but there weren't (and still aren't) many family owned parks that would embark on a project of that size. I'm not sure how much steel that saves - there's a lot more steel in The Big One, than Magnum, surely? The most important factor with the layout is that it has to remain 'at height' so it could pass over the monorail, PBE, Log Flume, Grand National etc.

In terms of the layout, I agree - it's really not that great, but I suspect that doesn't matter to your average rider. It goes very fast and it's tall, that's pretty much all it needed to do.

 

[Dar]

I thought GT was to blame for the drops being so high and naff because he insisted on it so the ride was a big feature of the promenade? As in, Arrow designed the second hill to be lower to gain more air but GT wanted it higher, so we got our 30 degrees and we liked it!

No idea what they were playing at with the turn around though! Why would you have the ride go into a prevailing shore wind? Wouldn't it have made more sense to just have the train go the other way round?

 

[Rick]

I feel like we've been discussing how much the ride sucks for the past 21 years, it is what it is at this stage, isn't it.

 

[DiogoJ42]

I thought GT was to blame for the drops being so high and naff because he insisted on it so the ride was a big feature of the promenade? As in, Arrow designed the second hill to be lower to gain more air but GT wanted it higher, so we got our 30 degrees and we liked it!

I think it was a combination of that, and the fact that almost all of the track is built on top of existing rides, limiting how low to the ground it can get.

 

[Dar]

I feel like we've been discussing how much the ride sucks for the past 21 years, it is what it is at this stage, isn't it.

I think it's because we know what a millstone it is around their necks. Like you said previously, it's going to need some serious money spent on it sooner rather than later, money that could've been spent on a newer investment instead.

 

[Enter Valhalla]

They've got themselves into a stalemate position with PMBO, it's such an iconic ride that if it was removed the park would probably close. Very few parks have one key ride that they HAVE TO keep like that. This puts them into a very difficult position particularly since the manufacturer no longer exists.

 

[Sammy]

See, I'm not going to lie I'm not the biggest fan of the ride and I've never made any sort of secret of the fact. Don't get me wrong it does have it's highlights, the first drop, turnaround and final dive into the tunnel being the notable ones however all the bits that lie between that are very bland as far as rideability goes. As has already been said, as much as it was a huge and iconic project at the time, it was done on the cheap, which is mainly why the ride is so funky and triangular looking. As far as I have heard in the past, all curved pieces of track or anything that involved an angle had to be manufactured at Arrows plant and shipped over, however anything that was straight could be produced in the UK at a much cheaper cost, hence the large number of 'ramp like' hills.

This shaping does however lend itself to the ride being fantastic to look at, it really does dominate the southern end of the 'Prom' just as Geoffrey T intended it to, especially at night when it really is nothing short of stunning! Ultimately though, as many have said it is that visually stunning angular hill design and retention of height that causes the rides main problem... It is completely devoid of airtime or force beyond the first drop! It will need money spending on it if it is to remain, which lets face it is going to have to happen as PB would die if they removed it.

As much as it's not my favorite ride, I would be sad to see it go. Unless of course it were to be replaced by something better? I mean, lets make that lift-hill steeper, push 300ft and get intamin in to produce some crazy air time... Calling @BigAl and his NoLimits wizardry to the topic Obviously we all know that's never going to happen, but hey, it's fun to dream every once in a while!

 

[DiogoJ42]

I vote we rename this topic "The PMBO Urban Legend Thread".

 

[Rick]

As far as I have heard in the past, all curved pieces of track or anything that involved an angle had to be manufactured at Arrows plant and shipped over, however anything that was straight could be produced in the UK at a much cheaper cost, hence the large number of 'ramp like' hills.

It was all manufactured in Horwich/Bolton.

 

[Rick]

PMBO has lots of work done to it every winter, what extra work does it need doing?

Big One only has that much work done on it every winter because of the state it's in.