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[The Smiler] Construction Updates / Ride Speculation Part 2 *SPOILER FREE*

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Maintainence teams will be testing the ride all through the night. What you are seeing when trains go round is the ride team testing operational tests.

These operational tests can only be done after the maintainence checks have been done. So no, no they cannot do the operational tests any earlier if the ride maintainence team say the ride is not ready to open.

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Oatcakedodger said:
It's plainly obvious that Towers are cutting down the usage of The Smiler by starting testing later than ride opening time, last Saturday the first empty trains didn't start going round the track till past 10.30 then the ride opened just before 11 and by the looks of the feeds this week it's roughly been the same, it's not rocket science that they start the test earlier to get the ride open at the stated 10 o clock time :twirly:
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Or.. it ran into problems during its engineering procedures and the fault was only rectified at around 10:30. Empty trains were running around the ride at about 9:55am on Monday morning for example.

As is kept saying, it is in the parks own interests to get The Smiler open as soon as possible. There's no way they'd even consider cutting Smiler's usage each day by opening it later.
 
Oatcakedodger said:
It's plainly obvious that Towers are cutting down the usage of The Smiler by starting testing later than ride opening time, last Saturday the first empty trains didn't start going round the track till past 10.30 then the ride opened just before 11 and by the looks of the feeds this week it's roughly been the same, it's not rocket science that they start the test earlier to get the ride open at the stated 10 o clock time :twirly:
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The maintenance team start work around 5:30am, but they also have other rides to get checked not just The Smiler. And as others have said when you see the ride running around 10am that's usually final pre-checks done by the ride team.

The Smiler ride team are being paid whether the ride opens or not so there is no financial benefit to Towers to delay the opening of the ride. In fact yesterday they extended X-Sectors close due to the Smiler delays so not getting open on-time financially penalises them.
 
It's never opened yet :( I'm in the Single Rider queue and they just announced that it will be open very soon, they've already let us past the entrance into the main pit though :)

EDIT - and they've started selling Fastracks at £6 a pop. They're already sold out :p
 
NF2 said:
EDIT - and they've started selling Fastracks at £6 a pop. They're already sold out :p
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NF2 said:
It's never opened yet :( I'm in the Single Rider queue and they just announced that it will be open very soon, they've already let us past the entrance into the main pit though :)

EDIT - and they've started selling Fastracks at £6 a pop. They're already sold out :p
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Not surprised with a queue time of two and a half hours
 
NF2 said:
EDIT - and they've started selling Fastracks at £6 a pop. They're already sold out :p
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Decisions like this make me wonder if there's just one mad man locked away in the towers somewhere feeding them dodgy ideas.

I understand the need to sell, but not just yet! The ride is still being worn in and the queues are long enough as it is!

Fastrack will ruin the normal queues throughput.
 
From what I hear from someone on park today, they are selling fastrack between £5-6 (not 100%) but it is limited to 20 an hour, and all of todays have sold out pretty much straight away.
 
I am rather shocked that fastrack is being sold only a week after the coaster opened. Not best pleased about it either. Though apparently the allocation is only 20 per hour which is ok. Still, £5 or £6 is too cheap in my opinion, it's the new ride, everyone will want fastrack for it. It could be priced at £10 and it would still sell out on busy days.

Hopefully the allocations do not get any bigger, otherwise it will really impact upon the main queue.

:)
 
I do find it odd they are selling fastrack on a ride which is only a week old, and has yet to open at 10am for a full day without some kind of issue!

And yes it didn't make the 10am opening once again today!
 
Rob said:
Still, £5 or £6 is too cheap in my opinion, it's the new ride, everyone will want fastrack for it. It could be priced at £10 and it would still sell out on busy days.
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Keep it down Rob! No, £6 will do Merlin, he didn't mean it!

Quite glad to hear the limit to 20 per hour. I think thats pretty reasonable...
 
mrvardermier123 said:
Rob said:
Still, £5 or £6 is too cheap in my opinion, it's the new ride, everyone will want fastrack for it. It could be priced at £10 and it would still sell out on busy days.
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Keep it down Rob! No, £6 will do Merlin, he didn't mean it!

Quite glad to hear the limit to 20 per hour. I think thats pretty reasonable...
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I'm afraid my opinion of fastrack is that they should be expensive. They are premium product and the pricing should reflect this. I'm certain people would pay £10 for fastrack on The Smiler this year whilst it is new.

:)
 
Rob said:
mrvardermier123 said:
Rob said:
Still, £5 or £6 is too cheap in my opinion, it's the new ride, everyone will want fastrack for it. It could be priced at £10 and it would still sell out on busy days.
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Keep it down Rob! No, £6 will do Merlin, he didn't mean it!

Quite glad to hear the limit to 20 per hour. I think thats pretty reasonable...
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I'm afraid my opinion of fastrack is that they should be expensive. They are premium product and the pricing should reflect this. I'm certain people would pay £10 for fastrack on The Smiler this year whilst it is new.

:)
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I agree, people pay £6 for Spinball so they'll not think twice about doing the same for The Smiler. I dread to think how slow the queue would be without the 20pph limit.
 
I agree fastrack should be 10-12 quid for smiler.

My opinion, double the price of fastrack, halve the amount of people using fastrack, Merlin get same amount of money, queues at Towers will move quicker.

Obviously that is a rough uneducated opinion, but the just of its there.
 
Well, I went to AT yesterday to ride The Smiler...

We joined the queue at about 10am, the ride the opened just after 11 and we were sat on it at 1pm. The queue didn't seem to get much shorter than 3 hours all day. The ride was running with 4 cars, which was good.

But I did see a few fast track people going past us which really pissed me and the bf off. On a very busy Saturday, we felt having a "rich queue" vs. "poor queue" as being pretty disrespectful to the majority of the guests. At this early a stage, every guest should have equal footing when it comes to queueing.

We tried to join the single rider queue towards the end of the day but were warned off the idea by the staff member at the entrance as single rider was estimated at being as long a wait if not longer than the main queue.

So... Moral of the story is: join the queue early to get it out of the way. Or throw money at AT to bribe your way to the front of the queue via fast track (as you can tell, I'm not a fan of the system!)
 
I am going to be #corrected tomorrow and I can not wait! :D

Saw on ridetimes that the queue was at 90 minutes at some points today, I can live with that if it's the same tomorrow :)
 
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