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Duel: The Haunted House Actually Strikes Back - Refurb Incoming

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Been thinking about this today and I’m going to answer with my professional business day job head on.

What business case is there for Merlin to spend money on reverting Duel back to the HH? No member of the GP is ever going to say, “I don’t like the current lighting design in Duel so I’m not going to go to Alton Towers this year”.

Merlin is a for profit company and there isn’t any ROI on changing the lights and upgrading a few props.

ROI comes from the CAPEX and marketing expenditure associated with a new attraction, and it’s for this reason why I think Merlin would rather gut the warehouse and do something new.

My enthusiast Towers loving head says otherwise, of course.
 
That's how us enthusiasts minds work XD.
You never know maybe even just talking about this, a higher up might look at this forums recent pages and think 'hmm, Duel does have low queues now, so maybe bringing some nostalgia back to the park might potentially raise attendance, but we can't be too sure yet. Need to tell the higher ups this.'
But that probably won't happen though :(
 
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Recent pages?
Twenty two of them, all saying the same things, going back the best part of five years.
Hasn't had much of a queue for over a decade.
 
Skyscraper said:
Yeah that's definitely part of it. It's got to be one of the highest throughput dark ride systems in existence. (and it's still the only one of its type!)
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I’m not sure; some of Disney’s omnimovers get well in excess of 2,000pph, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Duel doesn’t even come close to that title.

If you take Disney & Universal out of the equation, however, then I’d be inclined to agree, especially if you exclude omnimovers! 1,920pph isn’t a throughput that many parks not owned by the big 2 are getting! (Duel’s theoretical is 1,920pph, isn’t it?)
 
The Disney dark rides dwarf the capacity of Duel. But they need to, with the amount of visitors the parks get.

I am sure I've read that both Pirates and the Haunted Mansion rides get around 3500 per hour. 2000 people per hour is quite a low figure for the Disney parks, most rides exceed that. Even the railroad exceeds that.....anyway that's for another thread.
 
RC Racer is a bastion of Disney capacity that should be acknowledged.

This thread goes nowhere, it's full of people remembering the Haunted House as better than it was at the time of its closure in a lot of cases (if they even rode it, it closed before a lot of posters were born). I think you can poke all sorts of holes in Duel through a critical lens, but I don't think most park visitors look at it that way.

Replacement with something else wouldn't have a happy ending, almost guaranteed.

The fact that the question is posed in a way that we are deciding whether to put down the family pet or not is also irritating.
 
As it turns out, Duel’s capacity is far lower than I thought; according to TowersStreet’s fact file, Duel’s capacity is 1,296pph: https://towersstreet.com/theme-park/ride/duel/#factfile

I’m really shocked by that; I’d have guessed it at way higher! Has anyone on here ever actually timed Duel?

As for Disney capacity; I seem to remember reading somewhere that Peter Pan’s Flight at Magic Kingdom only hits 800pph (in Alton terms, that’s Smiler on a good day, from what I can gather), so not every Disney ride is a throughput behemoth!
 
Matt N said:
As it turns out, Duel’s capacity is far lower than I thought; according to TowersStreet’s fact file, Duel’s capacity is 1,296pph: https://towersstreet.com/theme-park/ride/duel/#factfile

I’m really shocked by that; I’d have guessed it at way higher! Has anyone on here ever actually timed Duel?

As for Disney capacity; I seem to remember reading somewhere that Peter Pan’s Flight at Magic Kingdom only hits 800pph (in Alton terms, that’s Smiler on a good day, from what I can gather), so not every Disney ride is a throughput behemoth!
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1,300!!! That's it? Blimey I'd think it'd be more than that as the ride is always on the move.
 
Matt N said:
I was surprised too; Nemesis theoretically gets more!

That’s given me a good question; what actually is Towers’ highest throughput ride?
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I'd hazrd a guess and say Hex, given each group can be up to 78 guests. 78 x 4 (Armoury, Cinema, Octagon and Vault) is 312... that's a maximum of 312 guests in the building at once, not including the queue line! :eek:
 
Skyscraper said:
I'd hazrd a guess and say Hex, given each group can be up to 78 guests. 78 x 4 (Armoury, Cinema, Octagon and Vault) is 312... that's a maximum of 312 guests in the building at once, not including the queue line! :eek:
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I think Hex’s throughput is perhaps lower than you might expect; each stage of the experience lasts a good few minutes, as far as I can tell.

TowersStreet lists it at merely 864pph, although that might just be for the ride itself.
 
Matt N said:
I think Hex’s throughput is perhaps lower than you might expect; each stage of the experience lasts a good few minutes, as far as I can tell.

TowersStreet lists it at merely 864pph, although that might just be for the ride itself.
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In this instance, the ride itself is all that matters from a throughput perspective, if you had a hugely elaborate high capacity walkthrough maze with a Booster at the end of it, the throughput of the whole attraction is only that of the Booster, because you end up with a bottleneck ahead of the component of the attraction with the lowest throughput.

That's what Hex does so remarkably, it has three components of equal length and duration that act as a production line for each batched group to proceed through.
 
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Rick said:
In this instance, the ride itself is all that matters from a throughput perspective, if you had a hugely elaborate high capacity walkthrough maze with a Booster at the end of it, the throughput of the whole attraction is only that of the Booster, because you end with a bottleneck ahead of the component of the attraction with the lowest throughput.

That's what Hex does so remarkably, it has three components of equal length and duration that act as a production line for each batched group to proceed through.
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So in that regard, you reckon Hex gives off the illusion of a higher throughput without actually getting a higher throughput?
 
Matt N said:
So in that regard, you reckon Hex gives off the illusion of a higher throughput without actually getting a higher throughput?
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Tbh I think we're getting throughput mixed up with capacity. As I stated above, Hex's (and Duel's, to be on-topic), capacity is massive, but that doesn't necessarilly mean the throughput is high as well.
 
Ah, sorry; I always thought throughput and capacity were the same thing, as people often use the two terms interchangeably!

In terms of the ride at Towers with the highest throughput (excluding transport rides, as I know the Monorail and Skyride both have obscenely high throughputs); I’d personally guess Congo River Rapids. Even though the boats only seat 8 people, they seem to go by at very frequent intervals, and that turntable must surely help! That doesn’t explain why it often gets such long queues in the summer, though… it often reaches a 1hr+ queue in the summer, and a ride like Duel never gets queues that long.

On the topic of Duel, it must surely be up there too, and I’m still quite shocked that its capacity is only 1,300pph… I thought it was way higher!

I feel like this throughput question might make a good thread… I’ll go and make one, to keep the Duel discussion on topic!
 
Throughput and capacity have become interchangeable. For example, RCDB lists Nemesis as having a capacity of 1,400 per hour, but you could argue it has a capacity of 64 and a throughput of 1,400.

Duel gets nowhere near its potential from a throughput perspective, in part because it doesn't need to, but also because the five seater cars don't lend themselves to that. Six worked better.
 
I did always wonder why they went with 5 seater cars on Duel; it seems like a very odd size of group, and something that would probably necessitate a single rider queue in order to be able to fill all the seats.
 
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