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Chessington World of Adventures Resort

For a small area the revamp looks incredible from the pictures online! why is everyone so negative, They have done a fantastic job with such attention to detail. There several portals and Easter eggs everywhere, large scale designed theming (unlike Drayton new area) to be honest they didn’t have to bother and old Merlin would of just plonked these rides down with minimal effort, so I actually feel they come on a long way. let’s be honest those rat runs are genius who ever thought of that idea & the goats! There so much to keep you interested while waiting for rides.

Just hope the goats get used too that big noisey swinging boat may take some time I’m sure.


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I have to agree. Initially seeing all the pictures including not at all subtle references to defunct (and superior) rides was making me cringe with every update. But after watching a few videos of the open area it does look like it's been done quite well. Certainly to a much higher standard than we are used to seeing for anything not built in a high Capex year.

Wooden creates and barrels are a definite step up over shipping containers. And it's not uncommon for even the big players like Europa and Disney to use them as extra dressing as well.

And the area seems to include multiple puzzles and quest games extra to the rides that I really appreciate.
 
Aside from my flippant comment yesterday, which was more because that picture is rather amusing in various ways (and once you've seen the RCT comparison, you really cannot unsee it), it does look like the new area has some very nice touches to it.

It is clear that the team behind the project had passion for what they were doing with this one. The treatment of trawler troubles certainly looks like a good upgrade for what we know is a standard rocking tug and that seems to be a recurring theme around the land. And the new animal exhibits look very nice indeed.

I can't help but wonder what they'd have achieved with an extra 10k on the budget, though. I suspect, given the relish we can see in elements of what has opened, with a little more they could have gone a very long way to upgrading some of those more 'standard' elements of the area. Providing crates is good set dressing, but hinting at what is in those crates provides immersion.
 
It's a shame the area theming has to be fenced off. That would make it look far better. But a combination of people and the park's own problems makes it almost impossible.

The Bouys R Us pun is classic Chessie humour. More of that than the low effort attempts at "honouring" old rides.

Looks perfectly fine elsewhere though. Nothing too particularly wrong but nothing outstanding either. A solid low year investment that have become so rare in the UK parks these days that I feel that some tend to get over excited about the quality of said additions.
 
Shipwreck Coast looks phenomenal; there are loads of lovely details, and the rides look good too! Great work, Chessington!

On a side note, I was looking at Tomb Blaster online, and can I ask; how on earth does it only have a throughput of 500pph on 4 trains?

I initially remembered it being an omnimover like a number of the dark rides at Europa Park, thus having a monstrous throughput of 2,000pph+, but my internet look proved that memory incorrect; it apparently runs 4 trains of 30 riders.

Even with 30 rider trains, though, I’d have said that the throughput would be at least 900pph (a train every two minutes), possibly even 1,800pph (a train every minute) what with how minimal dark ride restraints and checks are compared to something like a coaster.

Why is Tomb Blaster’s throughput so low? Seeing as I don’t really remember Tomb Blaster’s operations from my last visit, I am a little stumped that it only hits 500pph with four 30 rider trains running… that’s a dispatch about every 3.5 minutes. Surely the train can’t take anywhere near 3 minutes to check?

This memory could be wrong again, but I’m particularly surprised given that I’d remembered Tomb Blaster having a separate offload area…
 
Part of the problem is the ride duration - it's about 7 minutes from dispatch to offload so even with minimal loading/unloading times it's not physically capable of more than 900/hr on 4 trains (there used to be 5 but I've no idea when it last used all of them). Even if you hypothetically had loads of trains and ultra-fast loading, you'd still be limited by the slow movement of the trains and the relatively long show scenes - there's no way it could run with trains a minute apart unless you reprogrammed it.

I suspect there's also some internal procedures that dictates a longer dispatch interval. When I last rode it they seemed to be holding the train in onload far longer than necessary. In an attempt to figure it out I kept an eye on the block status LEDs in the op cabin and it looked like they were dispatching it when the previous train reached a particular scene. Sadly I don't think there's any way of finding out for sure what's going on, unless you happen to know some of the ride staff.
 
Matt N said:
Shipwreck Coast looks phenomenal; there are loads of lovely details, and the rides look good too! Great work, Chessington!
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Your definition of phenomenal is greatly mis-calibrated...

John said:
...it's not physically capable of more than 900/hr on 4 trains (there used to be 5 but I've no idea when it last used all of them).
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I believe (could be wrong) that five-train operation isn't now possible under their current operating procedures, and as such the fifth train has now been sacrificed for parts.
 
I'm not sure what the current procedure is, but certainly in the recent past the policy was that you couldn't have more than two trains in the ride at the same time (not including the trains in the onload/offload). The theory was that they didn't have enough staff to evacuate more than two trains before people would get bored and start climbing out. You'd end up with loaded trains sitting in the station waiting for another one to finish the ride.
 
But surely that is a valid H&S argument, isn’t it? Particularly if Tomb Blaster has no restraints, as many dark rides do.

If they don’t have the staff to evacuate a large number of trains quickly, people might take matters into their own hands and try and get out themselves after a certain amount of time has passed, which the park definitely doesn’t want.
 
Matt N said:
But surely that is a valid H&S argument, isn’t it? Particularly if Tomb Blaster has no restraints, as many dark rides do.

If they don’t have the staff to evacuate a large number of trains quickly, people might take matters into their own hands and try and get out themselves after a certain amount of time has passed, which the park definitely doesn’t want.
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Perhaps they should, you know, staff the ride to the level required to provide max throughput.
 
AT86 said:
Perhaps they should, you know, staff the ride to the level required to provide max throughput.
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I know staffing is currently an issue at the moment, what with COVID, Brexit etc, so I’m not sure that this is entirely within Chessington’s control.

Did this issue exist prior to COVID, or was it a symptom of the pandemic-related staff shortages?
 
Out of interest; what with Chessington’s supposed issues with ride capacity, what is the park’s highest throughput ride at present, and what sort of capacity does that get?

They must surely have attractions that get near to or exceed 1,000pph; for instance, things like Gruffalo and Tiger Rock look as though they’d be high capacity by virtue of the attraction type they are, what with the constantly moving loading stations and frequent dispatches often found on boat rides and log flumes. Vampire also looks like it should shift a decent capacity, what with multiple trains of 24 running on it. Why is it that the park struggles so much with some of these theoretically high throughput rides in its arsenal and annual guest figures of only around 1.5 million?

Alton and Thorpe certainly aren’t problematic when it comes to throughput, so I wonder why Chessington supposedly suffers so much? Legoland also arguably suffers to an extent (I’ve seen queues get very long for some of their rides on peak days), but not as much as Chessington appears to.
 
Matt N said:
Out of interest; what with Chessington’s supposed issues with ride capacity, what is the park’s highest throughput ride at present, and what sort of capacity does that get?

They must surely have attractions that get near to or exceed 1,000pph; for instance, things like Gruffalo and Tiger Rock look as though they’d be high capacity by virtue of the attraction type they are, what with the constantly moving loading stations and frequent dispatches often found on boat rides and log flumes. Vampire also looks like it should shift a decent capacity, what with multiple trains of 24 running on it. Why is it that the park struggles so much with some of these theoretically high throughput rides in its arsenal and annual guest figures of only around 1.5 million?

Alton and Thorpe certainly aren’t problematic when it comes to throughput, so I wonder why Chessington supposedly suffers so much? Legoland also arguably suffers to an extent (I’ve seen queues get very long for some of their rides on peak days), but not as much as Chessington appears to.
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Previous discussion on this subject from last year here, nothing has really changed with regard to Chessington’s ride hardware and operations since then, so lots of it is covered.

Post in thread 'Chessington World of Adventures Resort'
https://towersstreet.com/talk/threads/chessington-world-of-adventures-resort.97/post-331941
 
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