James Salter

Slammer Breakdown: Number 3

Slammer, one of Thorpe Park’s new rides for 2005, has already had a couple of “incidents” since it began operation in March. The day after it opened, its main arm got stuck at the top of its towers, trapping riders for quite a time. Contrary to reports in the press, they were not up there over 2 hours (somewhere around 30 minutes as far as I’ve been told) and they were not upside down.

However, just a couple of weeks ago, Slammer’s second “incident” occured in which riders were indeed stuck upside down for an extended time period when the ride decided a component was superfluous to requirements. Today, Slammer had its third “incident”, although thankfully not as serious as the second:

I was at the park with Paul O. We’d decided to ride Slammer after having an ice cream (lucky for us we had this 5 minute break or we’d most likely have been on the ride) and were standing in the queue. I was doing the usual video/photo taking. We both noticed the ride giving an extra rotation - my initial reaction was they must have increased the length of the ride program (thus the reason it had been down for testing most of the morning).

Following maybe another rotation, the ride slowed, stopping almost vertical. OK, not so normal operation.

  After a few seconds it began righting itself, although didn’t seem to be able to level properly. The ride ops gave the standard spiel about experiencing minor difficulties and that they needed to evacuate the queueline. Security and medics were almost instantly on the scene, together with people from Guest Services with palettes of water bottles.

 After the engineers turned up (and I’m guessing they and the PLC ran through the necessary safety checks) the ride returned to the ground extremely slowly around about 25 minutes later.At any theme park, the staff are the most important factor in its success. Thorpe Park’s staff proved once again today what an asset they are to the Tussauds Group. They acted with speed and professionalism to rectify what must have been a scary situation for those stuck on the ride.

Some credit must also go to the ride designers, engineers and manufacturers. Sure, this type of thing should not happen - especially three times. However, it is a testament to their skills that even in a situation like today’s, rides are built to such high specification that all the riders were brought down safely and in a relatively short amount of time without anybody suffering any serious injury. Many of us enthusiasts (me included) moan at times about over-the-top Health & Safety rules & regs. However, they obviously do a good job.

In fact, after a couple of hours testing, the ride re-opened for the end of the afternoon. Did we venture on it? Yeah, right, as if. If Slammer behaves itself over the next few weeks, I’ll consider it again.

I’ve uploaded a short video of the breakdown. As you’ll probably hear, it started as just a normal bit of ride filming. (Apologies for the language from some of the other people in the queueline).