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Thorpe Park: General Discussion

Secret Weapon said:
Ride Comparisons said that Hyperia was only running a single train today (ouch)


From: https://youtube.com/shorts/2F2NhoKI6Oo
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Yes it was on one train all day and it was no fun to queue for at all! We waited 100 minutes for it at the end of the day; I think we calculated something ridiculous like 400 riders per hour.

It was a pity as in all other respects today was a perfect day to be at Thorpe Park - good weather, short queues and everything operating apart from Zodiac and Vortex (which was open briefly but then closed for the day). I am not sure what's happened to the second train but I really hope they sort it soon. Hyperia does too much heavy lifting in the park to be running on reduced capacity. If today had been a peak day it would have been mayhem.
 
NuttySquirrel said:
Yes it was on one train all day and it was no fun to queue for at all! We waited 100 minutes for it at the end of the day; I think we calculated something ridiculous like 400 riders per hour.

It was a pity as in all other respects today was a perfect day to be at Thorpe Park - good weather, short queues and everything operating apart from Zodiac and Vortex (which was open briefly but then closed for the day). I am not sure what's happened to the second train but I really hope they sort it soon. Hyperia does too much heavy lifting in the park to be running on reduced capacity. If today had been a peak day it would have been mayhem.
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I really don't see how Thorpe think its acceptable to run Hyperia on 1 train, I hope its not for long....
 
Doesn't help matters when you have a huge RAP and Fasttrack queue, I wonder how much of that 400ph was main queue.

Fasttrack was basically at the entrance at one point. I imagine the passholder 1 shots and the stupid decision to reduce the price of Fasttrack to £8 (down from £20 last season) 1 shot had a huge impact on that.
 
Yikes... that isn't ideal! It was manic enough on 2 trains yesterday, holding a queue of over an hour for most of the day!

Was everything else operating well and with good throughputs @NuttySquirrel?
 
Call_um said:
Doesn't help matters when you have a huge RAP and Fasttrack queue, I wonder how much of that 400ph was main queue.

Fasttrack was basically at the entrance at one point. I imagine the passholder 1 shots and the stupid decision to reduce the price of Fasttrack to £8 (down from £20 last season) 1 shot had a huge impact on that.
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The RAP queue was extremely long today, it wouldn't surprise me if I was far off the main queues length

At that point the people in the RAP queue may aswell have waited in the main queue...
 
Call_um said:
Doesn't help matters when you have a huge RAP and Fasttrack queue, I wonder how much of that 400ph was main queue.
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We didn't brave it until ten minutes before closing so after about 25 minutes it was all main queue. Had we joined earlier in the day it would have been over 2 hours I reckon. I think they shot themselves in the foot with Fast Track today - hard to know if those in the FT queue were Platinum Passholders or had purchased one-shot, but regardless they absolutely need a way to digitally manage fast-track capacity.

Matt N said:
Was everything else operating well and with good throughputs @NuttySquirrel?
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Yep everything else was generally pretty good. Slightly bizarre batching on Nemesis Inferno, with the batcher standing at the entrance to the station rather than at the airgates - it meant people were completely missing front row queue and annoyingly we weren't swift enough to notice before being batched to row 4. The batcher on Saw seemed to be struggling a bit to manage the single rider queue as well as main, and the baggage desk ran out of wristbands, so it was all a bit chaotic.
 
_tyl35 said:
I really don't see how Thorpe think its acceptable to run Hyperia on 1 train, I hope its not for long....
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I'm sure it was down to a technical issue rather than operational cost cutting, they did have signs up notifying riders of reduced capacity. It's not great though, like I said if it had been a peak day it would have got silly. It surprised me a little just how much one-train operations impacted queue times, on what was actually a pretty quiet day for the park. Really hope they get it sorted soon.
 
It's a shame they don't have a third train on standby in case one of the other two trains fail

Granted - you could say this about every ride, but Hyperia is unusually busy and important (for the forseeable future, at least)
 
They made a big deal about getting 3 trains for Stealth so it would never need to run just one. It often ran one anyway in the early days due to other issues. Now they never have all 3 trains built up so any benefit they might have had is gone. I think one train might have become a parts donor.

One train ops disproportionately affect the speed of the main queue. I once waited 70min for Stealth from just inside the entrance on 1 train (no extensions open), a queue that wouldn't have been more than 30 minutes on two trains. That's despite one theoretical throughput on 1 train being considerably more than half the maximum.

A key issue is that reduced capacity doesn't change the number of people using RAP and also sends demand for FT through the roof due to the inflated queue times so the main queue ends up getting a lower proportion of the overall capacity than it would have if using all trains (as you've potentially got people with FT or RAP waiting an hour). If they know they're down a train they really need to be acting fast to cut off the supply of FT to ensure that others at least have a chance to get on the ride. Hyperia throughput is inadequate at the best of times but on one train it might be as low as 200/hr from the main queue instead of maybe 500-600 when running both trains.
 
I do feel as if this year there is zero caps on fastrack, the other week the fastrack queue was near the entrance most times we went near it, and I can’t imagine many of those are pass holders.

We worked out main queue was about 50% of those being let on, with the other 50% from RAP and FT. Queueing 80 mins in the day from the queue line shop, and then only 40 minutes at the end of the day when there was no RAP or FT from the same point in the queue.
 
Fast track is a way of making money out of poor operations, in the short term it’s printing money but in the longer term it’ll have an impact, due to reputational damage, lack of return visits due to poor experience etc.

But as with Merlin, thinking always seems to be short term.
 
Dhev123 said:
Great day and weather today.

Got on….6 rides in total 🤣🤣

Ride uptime was kinda horrific

Also today was the first time I’ve been on saw and none of the sound effects were on?? Has this been the case all season?
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That’s a shame. I went on Monday, and I didn’t notice a single breakdown all day aside from a brief closure of all outdoor rides due to lightning in the area!

I also don’t remember the sound effects on Saw not being on; everything sounded normal on there to me. I know they have changed the outdoor soundtrack on there, if that’s relevant, but maybe it was just a glitch when you rode?
 
Matt N said:
That’s a shame. I went on Monday, and I didn’t notice a single breakdown all day aside from a brief closure of all outdoor rides due to lightning in the area!

I also don’t remember the sound effects on Saw not being on; everything sounded normal on there to me. I know they have changed the outdoor soundtrack on there, if that’s relevant, but maybe it was just a glitch when you rode?
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Tbf i didnt hear it from the indoor queue either so think it just wasn’t on today - no air guns after the indoor drop and the man screaming during the heart line roll sound just didn’t go off

But yeah stealth was probably up for like 3 hours in total, then Saw & Hyperia were both stuck at same time on lift hill + colossus down at the same time (although Hyperia stopped on lift because of a rider having their phone out rather than an actual technical issue)

One perk of long queues is that I didn’t get a headache, so that’s a plus
 
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