Drayton Manor Park

[Secret Weapon]

The park always had bad accidents earlier on, I would assume most places did, given the primitive ride types and lack of health and safety (mainly because a proper industry had not been created at that point.

The snake train, as did the parks train have some quite bad accidents in the past. I seem to recall in the news and through word of mouth from people at the park that a particularly long scarf worn by a park guest, got caught around the axel of one of the trains wheels causing quite a bad accident. Details of this are scarse, but I believe this was sometime in the 1980's.

This is correct. I posted some links in the Ride Accidents thread earlier today (from the British Newspaper Archive) which confirmed that an Asian woman was in fact choked to death in 1988 after her headscarf became caught in the train's wheels (I had heard this story in the 1990s, but wasn't sure if it was true). It was supposedly the first fatality in the park's history (but sadly not the last).

I also heard rumours during the 1990s of an alleged fatality on the Splash Canyon (not to be confused with the 2017 incident), but I could not find any evidence of this online.

I also - unintentionally - came across stories of other accidents as well (which I had not previously heard), such as a collision between two trains on Python in 1989 after one car valleyed due to high winds; I assume that the block zone system must have been quite primitive at the time, in order to enable this to have happened? The entire ride layout was visible from the station (and there weren't that many trains to keep count of), and so I'm surprised that nobody noticed. Fortunately, I don't think that there were any severe injuries, though, and Pinfari declared that the ride was safe to be reopened after they flew over from Italy in order to inspect it.

P.S. Thank you for your detailed write-up; I'm not sure where you found this information, but it was very useful (and very much appreciated!).

 

[DistortAMG]

This is correct. I posted some links in the Ride Accidents thread earlier today (from the British Newspaper Archive) which confirmed that an Asian woman was in fact choked to death in 1988 after her headscarf became caught in the train's wheels (I had heard this story in the 1990s, but wasn't sure if it was true). It was supposedly the first fatality in the park's history (but sadly not the last).

I also heard rumours during the 1990s of an alleged fatality on the Splash Canyon (not to be confused with the 2017 incident), but I could not find any evidence of this online.

I also - unintentionally - came across stories of other accidents as well (which I had not previously heard), such as a collision between two trains on Python in 1989 after one car valleyed due to high winds; I assume that the block zone system must have been quite primitive at the time, in order to enable this to have happened? The entire ride layout was visible from the station (and there weren't that many trains to keep count of), and so I'm surprised that nobody noticed. Fortunately, I don't think that there were any severe injuries, though, and Pinfari declared that the ride was safe to be reopened after they flew over from Italy in order to inspect it.

P.S. Thank you for your detailed write-up; I'm not sure where you found this information, but it was very useful (and very much appreciated!).

Interesting about the train accident, I will read up about this later, thanks for finding this information as the information is indeed scarce.
I am unsure about the reasons Python crashed, but my information.

To answer your question about where I get the information, I live local to the park to this day, within a couple of miles, which in turn leads me to know plenty of generations of people involved with the park. I've also worked at the park in various capacities including ride operations and engineering. No longer an employee, but you get the idea. Last but not least, I research a lot online too, being a theme park fan!