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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

Smiley said:
I remember reading about Disney imagineering. They almost always separate unload/load stations so that the ride is " ready just for you". It also maximises throughput, but requires more staff (hence why Merlin probably don't do it). Yet Stealth, Saw, X etc do a good job at it.

No idea why they didn't do it for Hyperion, other than for the same reason they didn't build the second half of the coaster 😂
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I think you're right, it's down to cost. There's the cost of building a separate offload and the cost of extra staff. The other thing is (and I haven't ridden Hyperia so I'm not sure how much this applies to it), on a lot of coasters a separate offload wouldn't add much to the throughput unless you had a third train. Stealth and Rita work partly because the time between a train leaving the station and reaching the end of the ride is very short. But for most coasters, without a third train any improvement in throughput would be minimal. A third train is quite a big expense to buy, but also the trains are quite expensive to maintain, in terms of having a lot of parts that need regular inspections and testing, and parts with shorter design lives that are more likely to need replacing.
 
Funcone said:
I think you're right, it's down to cost. There's the cost of building a separate offload and the cost of extra staff. The other thing is (and I haven't ridden Hyperia so I'm not sure how much this applies to it), on a lot of coasters a separate offload wouldn't add much to the throughput unless you had a third train. Stealth and Rita work partly because the time between a train leaving the station and reaching the end of the ride is very short. But for most coasters, without a third train any improvement in throughput would be minimal. A third train is quite a big expense to buy, but also the trains are quite expensive to maintain, in terms of having a lot of parts that need regular inspections and testing, and parts with shorter design lives that are more likely to need replacing.
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it is partially down to cost, they could install an unload but what would the advantage be? the dispatches are limited by the length of the ride, if you got quicker you would just stack on the lift hill the only advantage may be more consistent quick dispatches but that is it.
in terms of capacity with a good crew you gain nothing, and can sometimes loose capacity due to issues such as where the baggage is located (saw), time between moving from unload to load, if running less trains it can dramatically hit capacity (see rita, can't load/unload simultaniously when on 1 train)
 
Just came back from Thorpe today. The park didn’t feel overly busy but many queues hovered around the 45 minute mark on average. That being said, we did Walking Dead advertised at 35 minutes which was practically walk on (only waited to be batched into the airgates), Swarm advertised at 45 in 25/30 mins and Colossus claiming to be 25 mins but only one train’s worth of guests in the queue. The longest part of the wait was walking that entire sodding queue line! Similar story on Rush too.

Thought on the whole the park was looking pretty well presented which was nice. The sooner the beach gets replaced though the better. It feels such a waste walking into the park and being greeted by an empty paddling pool.

Availability seemed a bit all over the place with most rides closing at least once through the day. Stealth was down as ‘Closed’ until about 1pm when it changed to ‘Closed All Day’. Ninferno also seemed to be having some issues, going up and down a few times. Tidal Wave croaked it early afternoon and hadn’t reopened by the time we left, though they had started sending an empty boat around.

To give the park credit though, it seemed that when anything did go down it was usually back up again pretty promptly, so that’s something I guess.

Hyperia’s a bit of an odd one. First time riding it today. It’s decent, albeit with a rather nasty MackRattle that seemed noticeable from the moment it left the station and went through the drunken curve. However… I don’t know if it’s just me, but putting the first drop to one side, I found myself thinking there’s nothing it really seems to do that you probably couldn’t have achieved just as well with a launched coaster half the height. You could still get a decent stall and outward overbank if you ask me (see the likes of Voltron or Velocicoaster). I think I’d sooner they’d done this for Hyperia and then gone for a more traditional hyper coaster (Silver Star, Shambhala, et al.) for their record breaker if they still wanted to chase the tallest coaster record. Would have been a good chance to give the UK the modern launched coaster that Icon could have been.

It’s not bad. Just a bit middle of the road for me. I’d probably put Swarm and Stealth ahead of it at Thorpe.

But all in all, a remarkably pleasant half-day at Thorpe, which felt like a stark contrast to Towers the other weekend.
 
Poisson said:
You can get good throughput with 1 station by good ride design. Olympia Looping has a possible throughput of 2880pph and can regularly clear 2500pph. Hyperia has neither good design or good ops.
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But Olympia Looping is operated as pay per ride.
No incentive to generate good throughput otherwise, one station or two.
Pay one price, queue all day.
We already have your money.
 
AT86 said:
Seperate off and onload only seems to come into play (at Merlin/Tussauds parks at least) when the on load and off load is the same side (Saw, Stealth, Rita) - because otherwise you can’t open the air gates for the next batch of guests until the current ones have cleared, which slows everything down.
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They don't have split load/unload because they do both from the same side, they do both from the same side because they are split. Having a entry or exit cross the track is effort and cost in design and build, no need to do that once the decision is taken to split load.
 
The best implementation of offload/onload separation I’ve seen is probably that of Blue Fire at Europa Park, where it seems adjustable according to the number of trains running.

The exit is still on the other side to entry, but when the ride runs 4 trains, they let people off before the train reaches the onload portion. Whereas when the ride runs 3, it operates more regularly, with offload and onload occurring in the same place.

I just thought that was a really clever implementation of the idea!
 
Matt N said:
The best implementation of offload/onload separation I’ve seen is probably that of Blue Fire at Europa Park, where it seems adjustable according to the number of trains running.

The exit is still on the other side to entry, but when the ride runs 4 trains, they let people off before the train reaches the onload portion. Whereas when the ride runs 3, it operates more regularly, with offload and onload occurring in the same place.

I just thought that was a really clever implementation of the idea!
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always thought the smiler could operate like this, if the added a door to the exit wall it could mean they can consistently hit good dispatches
 
Matt N said:
The best implementation of offload/onload separation I’ve seen is probably that of Blue Fire at Europa Park, where it seems adjustable according to the number of trains running.

The exit is still on the other side to entry, but when the ride runs 4 trains, they let people off before the train reaches the onload portion. Whereas when the ride runs 3, it operates more regularly, with offload and onload occurring in the same place.

I just thought that was a really clever implementation of the idea!
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Taron does the same, was confused the first time I got off the train back were the airgsates are.
 
I know it's all about cost (especially OPEX) but Merlin need to get their head out of their Subterra and understand that offering a slightly-cheaper slightly-poorer experience doesn't help them.

If you're going to build a ride, max out its throughput.
 
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