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’
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
I’ve just finished getting together my photos from the ECC Airpocalypse Weekend.
The whole weekend was superb - a great opportunity to ride some world-class rides, meet some new people and say hello to all the familiar faces.
After a hiccup at the gate down the woodland walk (someone forgot the key) which meant we missed most of our ERS on Nemesis, Alton Towers went all-out to make it up and treated us very well on Saturday.
We had a nice lunch in the hospitality marquee, which also featured a chance to see the BBC Inside Out documentary which has been made about a few of the club members this year. It was also announced that, to say sorry for the morning, Alton were giving us a half hour ERS on Spinball Whizzer at the end of the day.
Disaster almost struck when Rita - our real evening ERS coaster - went down towards the end of the day. Alton’s team did everything possible to ensure it was back up and running for us, and even let us into the machine room to see the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the ride. It turned out that, not only were we the first group to privately ride Rita, but we were also the first people to ever ride her in the dark.
To top off the day, Alton even laid on a couple of shuttle buses to return us back to the car park, saving us that long plod back on foot.
Sunday was the day I’d been dreading - it played host to the morning ERS on Drayton Manor’s Apocalypse. I’m no big fan of drop towers let alone 180ft ones, so this was going to be a challenge.
Thankfully, everybody made it easy for me, telling me that I didn’t have to ride it if I didn’t want to.
Over coffee, it was announced that there would be a special “Apocalypse Virgin’s Ride” as the first ride of the day. B*&@#�ds - I’m never gonna forgive you.
Somehow, I was gently persuaded (read: physical manhandled) into riding not just the sit-down, but also the stand-up side. Fellow Apocalypse-virgin-compadre Richard SC and I decided that we might as well complete the set (mad? us?) and rode the “terrifying” stand-up floorless side too - we even got Richard B to join us. Stand-up proved way scarier.
Lunch was outstanding: a full three-course meal including a full Sunday roast. Park MD Colin Bryan was on hand to give us an update on the park and answer questions.
Our evening ERS was on G-Force, Drayton’s new coaster for 2005. It’s a great little coaster which does a lot in its compact size, but it has an annoying problem with its restraints: they get progressively tighter throughout the ride, leaving it difficult to breathe by the end (or maybe that was just all the running around the queueline and up the stairs for an hour!)
Another brilliant ECC trip - can’t wait for Yorkshire in two weeks!
I spent a spectacular couple of days at Alton Towers and Drayton Manor with the ECC last weekend. Photos and trip reports should be online sometime over the next few days.
In the meantime, I’d like to say that if you see any pictures with a person looking like me in them - its not me, especially if they’re doing something very silly!
Update: Photos and some trip remarks now online