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Drayton Manor Park

This was the guy that mainly manned the car park entrance through the night, jet black hair, roughly in his early sixties.
Deserved to be the mayor.
Absolute gent, knew the kids were in care, he bent over backwards to give us a fun time.
Welcomed us back each year, checked out our special letter from the "family" as we were an all male group, then gave us a free go on the crazy golf!
Loudest wood pigeons in the world in the old forest campsite.
 
rob666 said:
This was the guy that mainly manned the car park entrance through the night, jet black hair, roughly in his early sixties.
Deserved to be the mayor.
Absolute gent, knew the kids were in care, he bent over backwards to give us a fun time.
Welcomed us back each year, checked out our special letter from the "family" as we were an all male group, then gave us a free go on the crazy golf!
Loudest wood pigeons in the world in the old forest campsite.
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I think I know who you mean, have no clue of his name but I vaguely remember someone matching that description.
 
The Operational problems of the park is that most youth now are more interested in there phones and social media. A lot of the original staff from the Bryan’s ownership days have left or retired and I don’t think the levels of staff are no where as good as it was before.
Like I know it’s good for the visitors that that park is open longer during the school holidays a minimum 6pm close but on some days it’s open to 7 or 8 and even 9 during the firework events. Staff ain’t happy they got to work long hours for the same minimum pay.
Like I know Paulton’s pay there staff more than the minimum wage but it’s just under the living wage. I bet they have better training also before they allowed to work in the park
 
If it was an issue with wider “youth” culture, wouldn’t most parks have sluggish ops?

The likes of Alton and Thorpe seem to do perfectly well with often similarly young ride operators, so I don’t think the demographic of the staff is the likely cause.

As @Poisson said, I think the lack of vehicles and design choices likely doesn’t help. That lap bar procedure on The Wave, for example, is an absolute throughput killer even with the best team!
 
Themeparksandy1981 said:
The Operational problems of the park is that most youth now are more interested in there phones and social media. A lot of the original staff from the Bryan’s ownership days have left or retired and I don’t think the levels of staff are no where as good as it was before.
Like I know it’s good for the visitors that that park is open longer during the school holidays a minimum 6pm close but on some days it’s open to 7 or 8 and even 9 during the firework events. Staff ain’t happy they got to work long hours for the same minimum pay.
Like I know Paulton’s pay there staff more than the minimum wage but it’s just under the living wage. I bet they have better training also before they allowed to work in the park
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The operational problems within the park are down to management and nobody else.

And we may be viewing the old park through rose tinted glasses...through the millennium years, even though we had a fantastic time...operations were appalling back then if the park was anything like busy.

They are a small family park, when it gets busy things fall apart.
 
The biggest problem is they take on 2 many school trips. My Daughter went yesterday and they were there from opening to closing and only managed to get on:
Gold Rush
Blasting Barrels twice
The rapids
The queues for Maelstrom was out the main queue and was near the train station.
 
Themeparksandy1981 said:
The biggest problem is they take on 2 many school trips. My Daughter went yesterday and they were there from opening to closing and only managed to get on:
Gold Rush
Blasting Barrels twice
The rapids
The queues for Maelstrom was out the main queue and was near the train station.
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It's not limited to school trips. Your daughter managed more than I did on the last Sunday in June.
 
The throughput is mostly down to management, AT and TP have quite high capacity, (and with some such as wicker man sometimes exceed manufacture capacity estimates if I recall correctly)


Drayton has multiple rides, which could operate with more than one train, but they only have one train on track.

another issue though is dispatch times, and sometimes this is a manufacture fault (the art trains sound like a massive pain to dispatch) however it also sounds like there is a lack of motivation with staff to get them dispatched quickly, I would imagine there could be a few reasons (don't AT pay the liveable minimum wage, so possibly lower wage) the management also sets a lot of tone, if the focus is on slowly doing stuff and there are no complaints then people will tend to do that, as that is easy.
 
flyingguitar said:
Drayton has multiple rides, which could operate with more than one train, but they only have one train on track.
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Accelerator, Troublesome Truck and Buffalo all have 1 train and don't have the room to operate more

Loki, Wave Swing, Thor are all slow loaders

Wave, Wild West Shootout and Winstons can run multiple but don't
 
Accelerator Is the best coaster for output in the park.
I asked Staff about Showdown been on 4 trains and that’s cause it takes less than 3 mins to complete the cycle. There is only 7 carts now. They use 4, 2 are stored inside the ride theming.

From: https://youtu.be/UBWHdHat-4Y?si=nmKhm2RIp3zjZykG

There also 2 inside the maintenance building that you can see from the Haunting queue line and the other used for spares.
Winston the same they can add more cars when it’s busy but with you now having to also wear a seatbelt and well as the lap bar it’s taking a lot longer to load/unload.
 
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The trouble with Drayton is there are a large number of rides with identifiably lower capacity than they were designed for. Wave is obvious and Gold Rush is (hopefully) temporary but besides those two they also have:

Haunting - now just 28 people/cycle

During the meet I noticed that Winston had one car running empty, presumably due to a problem with it. From what I could tell, there were 2 cars on the storage track (one with no roof) and no space for another, so they were forced to cycle an empty car all day. Not ideal.

Shootout is a long enough ride to run at least one more car without stacking.

SF10 seems to run fewer boats nowadays too, maybe 6-8. Do they still have more in storage somewhere?
 
Bowser said:
Does feel like a bit of...

1752761795951.png
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The difference is that 120 minute queues at Alton Towers happen very rarely, and only on the most peak of days, whereas Drayton Manor is seemingly getting 60 minute queues a fair bit on weekends at the moment.

Alton Towers also don’t tend to run things on 1 train habitually as Drayton does; the park does tend to get pretty good throughputs in general. I’m not saying the park is perfect on queues, but I think the tales some like to imply of 120 minute queues across the board at Alton and other Merlin parks are highly exaggerated.

I’ve only ever seen 120 at Alton for a brand new major ride or on the absolute busiest of busy days.
 
Bowser said:
Does feel like a bit of...

1752761795951.png
Click to expand...

Alton Towers generally though it is longer queues because there are more people visiting, they are still running rides at moderately high throughput (main issues of rides running much lower than they should are Get Set Go and the monorail). Whereas Drayton Manor could run more Haunting cycles, they could have more cars on Sheriff Showdown, they should have both trains on Gold Rush and a less faffy lap bar on The Wave.

Not saying AT don't have issues with operations, but it does seem the queues are too long relative to the number of guests in the park at Drayton Manor. Blackpool often have similar issues.
 
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Visited DM the first Sunday in June and it was a quiet day, but operations definetly left a lot to be desired. A combination of poor capacity rides, single train ops, but there was also a lack of urgency from the staff and of course who the impact of customers. Drayton Manor is generally a younger audience park where kids and parents can be a bit slow and faff about when getting on and off rides, maybe I’ll have more sympathy when I become a father!

I know it can get a tough time on here but I like the park, however I wouldn’t go anywhere near it in the peak season.
 
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