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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

Or the highly anticipated Minion Blaster to coincide with their 20th Minion movie!

Can’t bloody wait.

Edit: Will there ever be anything to get excited about at Chessington?
Rethemeing rides doesn’t really do all that much, buying some generic thrill ride also doesn’t add much, and neither do more hotels. The only thing that would actually interest me, regardless of what it is, would be a new land.

I feel that Chessington just seems to have come to a grinding halt as of the last ten years — no new significant park developments, just dressing up what they had since the Merlin take over.
 
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In keeping with the children’s book theme, can we get a BFG to level the place?
 
I do think chessie has improved the past couple of years. There was a period when they seemed to get nothing.

Now at least they are doing new things each year or so. It’s just a shame they Merlin/Tussaud’s let everything fall apart which means they are just spending money fixing old broken rides. Which doesn’t help the parks capacity at all.
 
My issue with Chessington is simply that it utterly fails when more than about 500 people turn up as they have so few rides capable of dealing with anything even slightly resembling a crowd. They've got Vampire as their headline coaster which struggles to get over about 600 people/hr. Fury is in the same ballpark and beyond that their coaster collection consists of only a Mack powered and Maurer mouse. All told they're probably getting about 2000/hr between the 4 of them, meanwhile at Towers the two FV B&Ms on their own will beat that with ease.

The capacity problems continue across the park. Zufari never seems to run more than 3 trucks, Tomb Blaster's throughput is practically non-existent (despite appearing that it should be very high) and generic stuff like Seastorm, Buccaneer and Monkey Swinger somehow regularly get queues of over 30min which is completely bonkers.

If it wasn't a Merlin park and/or was somewhere less easy for people to get to it'd probably be fine as the lower guest numbers would hide the underlying problems - as it is you've got Disney length queues for fairly average rides. I'd far rather wait 75min for Crush through it's full queue line than 75min for Fury from just before the shop.
 
Hey, does anyone have an outside picture of the 5th dimension’s show building?

Also, when did Abdab leave Vampire’s queue? The places he used to inhabit seem oddly bare at the minute...
 
John said:
They've got Vampire as their headline coaster which struggles to get over about 600 people/hr.
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I know the low throughput nowadays is to do with it running 2 trains max than 3 and the general operations, but is it also to do with the general design of them since they were changed? The other Arrow suspendeds all have a much higher throughput and every other one except Vortex has more riders per train (28 vs 24).
 
Converting it to Vekoma trains won't have helped - they take ages to park and have fewer seats, plus in the usual Vekoma fashion the gates don't line up with the train which inevitably means people get lost when boarding. I first rode in 2007 and assumed the out of line gates were left over from the original trains.

The loss of the 3rd train has really lessened the visual impact of the ride too. It was quite a spectacle to stand underneath it when there was a train on both sections.
 
Vampire had a lot of changes that affected throughput badly when the trains were changed. Like the speed the trains re-enter the platform, the position of the blocks

Hairobics said:
Also, when did Abdab leave Vampire’s queue? The places he used to inhabit seem oddly bare at the minute...
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Those figures should have never been in the queue. It was as simple as pulling out some old characters and dumping them on the ground in broad daylight, looking totally lifeless and exposed to elements.

Such a shame some idiots ruined characters from a classic ride by putting them outside. They looked terrible there and the weather destroyed them.
 
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Decided to drop in at Chessington today. I know it's the Easter Holiday's and it's Chessington but the queue times were absurd. At one point Vampire, Dragon's Fury, Zufari, Room on a Broom, Rattlesnake (and from the look of it guest complaints) all had queue times of two hours or more; Gruffalo, Scorpion Express, Tomb Blaster and Rameses Revenge were all at least an hour; Tiger Rock opened for a short while so we made our way over there, only to find the ride being evacuated. It was closed for the rest of the day.
 
Oh dear we were planning to head down this Friday, sounds like it may resemble something from a horror film.... At least it is only an en route stop rather than special trip for us.
 
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