Wicker Man - General Discussion

[jon81uk]

The pre-show room and station are awfully designed with not enough space between the two. It overspills so often and that is often as a result of batchers cramming both the holding and pre-show rooms full.

Bad design often equates to bad operation.

Yes the pre-show room should have been larger and the station needs another switch-back of queue space. The whole building needed to be bigger. The pre-show is good and should exist, but it doesn't need to be as crammed in, its bad design and bad operations.

 

[Bert2theSpark]

Yes the pre-show room should have been larger and the station needs another switch-back of queue space. The whole building needed to be bigger. The pre-show is good and should exist, but it doesn't need to be as crammed in, its bad design and bad operations.

Am I correct in thinking that originally the pre-show and baggage hold were originally one building, more akin to the station next to it on the original plans for the ride? Back when the Flume’s station was going to be retained for the Smokehouse restaurant and the viewing plaza were still on the plans too?

 

[Squiggs]

Am I correct in thinking that originally the pre-show and baggage hold were originally one building, more akin to the station next to it on the original plans for the ride? Back when the Flume’s station was going to be retained for the Smokehouse restaurant and the viewing plaza were still on the plans too?

Hard to say. I'm not sure that the baggage hold as we have it ever actually appeared in any of the plans, likely because it is such a small structure.

At the point of the EIA (which I think was the only documents which referenced the Smokehouse, but happy to be corrected), the preshow was shown with a question mark, suggesting that at that point they hadn't actually decided they would have a preshow at all. Notably, whilst most other buildings are shown in that plan pretty close to their final form, the suggested preshow building shown in those plans was a notably different scale and orientation to the preshow that appear in the final plans (which is pretty much exactly as it was built).

 

[owenstreet7]

If Merlin were truly that terrified of water quality or guest behaviour on log flumes, they would have closed Dragon Falls at Chessington and Loggers Leap at Thorpe Park immediately. They didn't. The Flume went because it was knackered, not because it was dangerous.

I'd agree with Goose on this one, we still have Tiger Rock so I don't think Merlin were terrified of Log Flume behaviour. I think they'd be more terrified of Rapids behaviour.

Modern Log Flumes also now have lap bars with a prime example being Chiapas (my recommended next investment inspiration for Alton Towers).

I remember Chris Atkinson (author of "Making Thorpe Park") mentioning this rumour in an online interview.

John Wardley told Chris in "Making Thorpe Park" that his original layout for Stealth was much longer, but I'm not sure if Chris ever asked him whether the scrapped portion became Rita or not...

I saw something a while ago that Stealth was going to use Xcelerator's layout as a mirror as a concept.

With Rita, there has been a lot of rumours about it including being part of Stealth and also allegedly being planned for Oakwood before the plans changed due to the Hydro incident.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

I'd agree with Goose on this one,

Only took you the best part of two months.

We still have Pirate Falls: Treasure Quest at LEGOLAND Windsor too,