Drayton Manor may not quite compete with Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, but it doesn’t do badly for a family run business in Tamworth. It’s certainly worth a visit once or twice a year. And so it was on a rainy Monday at the beginning of July that I found myself in Thomas Land, Drayton Manor’s big new investment for 2008.
While a number of Drayton’s past installations have lacked the visual polish that they’d get at theme parks with larger budgets, Thomas Land looks fantastic. The level of detail is almost incomparable against the rest of the park.
Continue reading ‘Thomas the Tamworth Engine’
The fair rolled back into town this week, with Tewkesbury celebrating its several-hundredth Mop Fair. Unlike in the past where the working class would carry mops to the fair and seeking employment for the coming year, the modern fair sees Tewkesbury filled with sideshows, food and many of the Danter Bros’ best rides. Below are some highlights from this year’s Mop:
The fair takes over most of the centre of Tewkesbury
Continue reading ‘Freakin Out at the Fair: Tewkesbury Mop Fair 2007′
The Saturday of the ECC Knights and Legends trip saw us meet up with a load of folk at Camelot and beginning the day with an ERS on Knightmare, their new coaster for 2007.
The ride was originally in Japan but, when the park closed, was bought together with the rest of the rides by a business consortium. Various rides were bought and can now be seen all around the world, but no buyer could be found for BRMX and it was left in an expensive storage facility at a dockyard in the UK. Camelot’s owners were able to do a deal to allow the ride to be “stored” at the park instead.
It rides very smoothly apart from a few kinks in the track. The highlight is definitely the “psycho drop” which pulls 5G as it twists downwards.
Continue reading ‘Camelot - It’s Only a Model’
Today saw a visit to the home of the precursor to the end of the world, haunter of my dreams, the tower of doom: Apocalypse. Yes, today Tom, John and myself visited Drayton Manor.
The inevitable lowlight of the day was a ride (or should that be a stand) on their big nasty drop tower. As you may know, me and drop towers don’t get along. Me and slightly broken drop towers get along less well. Today Apocalypse lost its tilt, meaning the standup side didn’t lean out to let us face the ground.
But that was only the beginning of a rather tiltless day. Drunken Barrels, tipsy as it may have been, certainly wasn’t tiltsy either. Instead, it has turned into a flat bog standard teacup ride without so much as a wimper of a raised platform.
Other parts of the day were better though, aside from the equally inevitable crushing blow on G Force and bangin ride on Shockwave. We rode the cable cars which are never open and visited the old penny arcade.
Things we learnt today:
- ostriches voluntarily gave up the ability to fly
- waltzers in the dark aren’t very good if they don’t spin
- you can’t have enough piratical adventures
Not content with controlling a large portion of Staffordshire’s tourist dollars, Alton Towers are now looking to control the weather too. Apparently they’re looking at a technique originally developed in Communist Russia that aims to prevent it raining.
Rain-seeding involves firing silver iodide into clouds in a bid to make them empty over an unimportant area (Stafford? ;-)).
In addition to Russia, China is a big fan of the process and are due to use it to ensure a dry and pollution free Olympic Games in Beijing next summer.
However, I doubt residents of Stoke-on-Trent will be so excited when their town gets turned into Soak-on-Trent.
Wow, look - James has written a post!
That’s not all I’ve been writing. Take look at the trip reports from last weekend’s ECC AGM and a Sunday morning trip to Chessington.
