Tag Archive for 'nemesis-inferno'
Was it or wasn’t it? Has it or hasn’t it? Would it or wouldn’t it? By yesterday evening speculation was huge. With Thorpe Park’s Rehearsal Day mere hours away, rumours at the two extremes were circulating the Internet: Stealth had been handed over to Thorpe and they were planning on getting some managers to run it for Rehearsal Day, or there were still issues with the ride and it would not be available.Confirmation of one of those two rumours was given via the matrix display boards over the ticket kiosks this morning. Unfortunately it was the least welcome, rather than the fantasy everybody, secretly or not, had hoped for.
Stealth wasn’t alone in it’s non-functioning status. Accompanying it were (deep breath) the farm trains, Tidal Wave, Slammer and Rush.
I took the traditional start to the Thorpe season: a ride on Colossus (take the punishment, then things can only get better). I was OK with the ride for most of last season, but it’s become a little less subtle this year. Regrettably, it’s now time for me to join the bandwagon. Whoever described Colossus as running on wheels the shape of 50 pence pieces has captured the ride beautifully. Thank goodness Thorpe haven’t got any more Intamin coasters with the potential to become rough within a few months of opening. Oh.
After taking quick rides on Inferno (with a freshly painted chewing gum free floor, although the ride needs to bed back down - it’s lost a lot of it’s Nemesis-like forcefulness from the end of last season) and Vortex (complete with spiffy new blue seat lock indicator lights), I went to explore the rest of the “old” park.
Rush and Slammer both have their own Cherry Pickers at the moment - none of last year’s sharing. One of the engineers working on Rush was bashing the hell out of something at the top of it with a big hammer at one point - structural improvements? 
Beside Rush is our ever-present faithful friend Zodiac. Hold on … that’s not Zodiac. Imposter! Drayton’s old Cyclone is trying to pass itself off as the astrologically themed Enterprise. I say rename it Cyclodiac. Just for a laugh, you know.
Tidal Wave has got a new sponsor and a nasty green colour bridge.
I didn’t notice this until it was pointed out to me: the old shortcut through Octopus Garden has been closed with the addition of extra fencing and tables and chairs outside the doughnut shop.
Now read it again. It says top talent scouts, not topless talent scouts. Maybe I won’t bother buying extra memory cards for my camera after all.
After the first hour or so I bumped into some ECC peeps. We went to watch the new film, Pirates 3D. I don’t get it - to me it’s just Pirates 4D without the vibrations, wind and seagull sh … oh (again).
Before long (some would say inevitably) I found myself in the Detonator queue. Margaret D definitely has a talent for this. After witnessing the countdown stop and the people stuck at the top for several seconds on the ride before ours, I was looking forward to it even less than normal. My confidence wasn’t boosted when I sat in my seat and found the handholds had been bound up with masking tape. Damn stupid horrible ride.
The way down was much better than the way up. I’m sure I’ve never been out of my seat for so long before. Woooo! What a great ride.
Service in Bush BBQ was interesting. No food, but a mass of staff all being trained to use the till. Lucky we all appeared when we did really: it meant they could all have a turn serving customers with a huge variety of orders. Alright, maybe just coffee.
News then spread that Stealth was due to make some test runs. Time to explore the “new” part of the park.
The new Amity Cove: There’s just time for a quick car race and cup of tea prior to evacuating before the next tidal wave hits. 
Welcome to Amity Speedway
There’s a new food place too
Mmmmmm … definitely got to try this soon
WWTP Cape Radio are doing an Outside Broadcast from Amity Speedway - strangely they spend most time whittering on about back problems and something called Stealth rather than giving any race commentary.
There are some fantastic theming details scattered around.
Rita may have had the first tyre entrance, but Stealth’s is much larger and fits in a lot better. Generally more impressive.
The only non-zero-to-eighty seat in the vacinity
Flyin da flag, innit
Good things come to those who wait
Prepare for (test) launch
Go! Go! Go!
Going up…
Crawling over the Top Hat - rollback?
Not this time
Speeding towards the airtime hill
Apparently this was one of the prototype Stealth trains
This was my first Thorpe Rehearsal Day so it’s difficult to judge it’s relative strengths and weaknesses in comparison with previous years. The park seemed unready, from the unavailabilty of several rides to the half-completed main entrance gates. However, once everything’s completed this has all the makings of a very memorable season.
Thorpe Park, 2006 style. Click here for a bigger view.
See you on Wednesday!
I headed off to Thorpe Park on Sunday to meet up with Paul O and have a few rides on Rush. Paul hadn’t yet riden Rush, because he had to go on holiday to Florida. Yeah, don’t feel too sorry for him.
Unfortunately, come opening time, Rush was closed and was being worked on by an engineer up the top of a cherry picker. A slight change of plans resulted in an early morning ride on Colossus instead (my suggestion, guilty as charged). As Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far, Tidal Wave was the necessary next stop. At least we were cool for the rest of the morning!
Since we were already wet, we decided to do a mini-tour of the water rides. After stopping off at Loggers Leap (where we somehow managed to flood the boat - sorry about you being in the front Paul - total accident!) we headed for Rumba Rapids.
It was as uninspiring as usual, until we reached the end of the ride where we encountered our first breakdown of the day:
For some reason, the lift had stopped meaning boats were backing up at the bottom
Eventually the entire fleet of boats surrounded us
When the lift was restarted, we still didn’t go anywhere: all the boats had wedged themselves together, out of reach of the spinners
A member of staff was dispatched to come and, well, just stare at all the boats with a puzzled expression on his face
The current eventually pushed our boat onto the lift
There were still a lot of boats stuck
The empty boats pushing their way in front didn’t exactly help
Finally somebody had a sensible idea: hold the boats back so that when one moved, it didn’t get wedged against the others
After escaping our river adventure, we took a couple of rides on Detonator. From the top of the tower you get a good view over the Stealth construction site. A fair amount of progress has now been made. They’ve begun to put in footers and groundwork for the launch. It really is a compact site!By that time, Rush had finally opened and we were able to ride … after it breaking down while we were in the SRQ.
Paul gets a Rush (4th from the left, with his hands up)
Following some lunch, while in the Pirates 4D queue, we spotted one of the trains stopped at the top of the Inferno lift hill. According to
The Sun, it was a major incident where 50 people were stuck in blistering heat for half an hour. Apparently the passengers began to panic and shout for help, but it took ages for anybody to notice or for staff to go to their aid.From what I saw, and after talking to other people stuck on the ride, the reality was somewhat different. The ride was only stopped for about 10 minutes. Staff were almost immediately climbing the lift hill to make sure all the guests were OK. As for the blistering heat - apparently it was actually quite pleasant up there with a nice cool breeze. Oh, and also only has 28 seats per train, not 50.
Attending to Inferno riders on the lift hill
Staff decending a few minutes later
I’m surprised the tabloids didn’t pick up on the real news story of the day: Slammer broke down again, trapping riders for 30 minutes at the top. (See the
separate blog entry for the full story)
We also noticed that Detonator had broken down and had staff/engineers on the cage mid-afternoon
Throughout the day we managed a few rides on Rush, although it broke down every time we were in the queue. We had to be evacuated off it once (hardly a big deal since it can’t stop anywhere but the bottom of the swing - just step off the ride and out of the exit gate). Worryingly, the engineer then went to fiddle with the restraint and look under the seat I had just been sitting in. Another breakdown meant they had to clear the queueline - oh well, another exit pass to add to our growing collection!
Rush broken down … again
Overall, Rush stands to become a brilliant ride. Its only a couple of weeks old, so the breakdowns are understandable. The real problem at the moment is the short ride program, but that should be sorted soon.We spent the end of the afternoon on Inferno, which had a minimal queue by that stage. It was getting too hot to walk all the way around, so we ended up using SRQ a couple of times. When that closed, we used one of our exit passes (don’t worry, its not exactly as if we’re short of them and as I said, it was
hot).
Inferno in the sunshine: its been getting quite intense recently - following in the footsteps of its big sister?
A hot, busy day resulted in piles of litter in the N:I queueline by the end of the day
Possibly the biggest shock of the day - Slammer reopened only a couple of hours after it threw its wobbly. Strangely, we declined to ride it, even though it was walk-on for the rest of the afternoon. The blue sky and sunshine did allow for some nice photo opportunities though:
Slammer and an aeroplane
Heading for the ground
Just before park close, we walked past Rush in the hope of a final ride. You’ve guessed it: it had suffered another breakdown, meaning the queueline had been closed for the day. Closed, that is, for everybody but us. Courtesy of a friendly staff member, we were allowed to join the back of those already in the queue who had been promised a ride when Rush was fixed. Huge thanks to her for adding yet another “magic moment” to our day!A day in the park when there are so many breakdowns on major rides (Rush, Slammer, Inferno, Colossus, Rumba Rapids and Detonator were all down at some stage) can be miserable - especially in the heat we had on Sunday. However, thanks in large part to some great staff members we had a fantastic day, proving its always worth being friendly and stopping for a chat.
Its been almost exactly a month since, if everything had gone to plan, Slammer should have opened at Thorpe Park. It eventually opened on the 28th, only to close the next day after getting stuck at the top and leaving guests in the air for half an hour. I’ve been checking Thorpe’s website regularly ever since and finally I was rewarded yesterday when it said that Slammer would be available from midday. Reports suggested this was true and, having already made rough plans on popping in to the park inbetween other things I had to do today, I drove down there this morning.
Arriving at 10am, I discovered the park had been open since 9:30. Apparently even though Semantic are back in charge of the website, its still as inaccurate as last year.
Anyway, although the lure of Slammer was intense, coasters were calling. Colossus was running two trains: no need to use the Single Rider Queue and I was on within a few minutes. A fantastic ride - after a rough couple of years Colossus is beginning to win back its #1 Thorpe coaster spot in my heart. Somehow I don’t think it’ll be keeping that for long though, but more on that in a moment. There seems to be more difference between the two trains this year: I watched the other one barely crawling around the track. I’m surprised it made it back to the station without stalling it was so slow!
Nemesis: Inferno’s queue wasn’t even emerging from the volcano, so I gave that a quick shot too. Not much to say: still its normal smooth great self.
After that, I decided I had been putting off the inevitable long enough. (For some reason I got a bit intimidated when I actually saw people on Slammer. Bizarre, considering how much I’d been looking forward to riding, but I began comparing its height with Detonator. Not a wise move if you’re me.)
The queue was very short, but it still took a while to get on. Its hardly surprising considering today must only be the second full day of operation. I’m sure as the staff get more used to the ride things will get faster. They need to: Colossus was dispatching 3 trains for every run of Slammer.
What can I say? Slammer is intense! There’s some great music as it rises into position (think dramatic Classical music with a choral accompaniment). The forces range from airtime to pushing-through-the-seat positive Gs as it spins. The restraints are fantastically comfortable … as long as you don’t try sticking your arms out in front of you (they cut into my shoulders then). They come complete with a padded headrest - ideal when you’re straining to get a few more seconds looking at the spectacular views of the Dome or Loggers Leap, depending on which way you’re facing. Of course, that’s nothing to the view of the ground hurtling towards you!
At the end of the ride, I couldn’t wait to get off. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to get straight back in the queue for another go.
Damn it. Am I really jinxing this ride? I made it all the way through the queue, only for Slammer to break down as I reached the loading bays. I waited around for quarter of an hour or so, but when all the engineers arrived the ride op advised us all that there was little point in waiting: it would be quite a while before it would reopen.
I know when to admit defeat, so I made my way over to Vortex. It had probably the longest queue in the park at the time, but I like it. How about that for justification.
Anyway, my jinxing abilities weren’t too far behind me and it soon ran into problems. Somebody managed to become detatched from their shoe whilst riding. Not too big a problem, or so you would think. That is, until said shoe gets stuck in the floor mechanism, meaning an engineer had to come to retrieve it before the floor could be raised to let all the guests off. It goes without saying that there was some additional emphasis to the PA announcement on the next ride: “Welcome to Vortex. Guests are reminded to secure all loose articles including mobile phones, hats, wallets and shoes before boarding.”
I got a fantastic ride on the top of the swing all the times it counted and a hot dog.
I bought the hot dog after the ride of course.
Wandering past Pirates 4D I saw a show was just about to begin. Since I’d just eaten and I haven’t seen the film for over a year, I thought I’d watch. Impressed! All the effects were working and the scratched old film has been replaced by a new Digital Projector (I assume from the lack of dust and filmgrain). This, however, hasn’t stopped the slightly odd out-of-sync blurred-vision when something moves across the screen too quickly.
Nothing has changed on the Project Stealth site as far as I could see, apart from the addition of a few plant pots around the construction walls and posters featuring the new coaster’s stats.
Having been disappointed earlier, I went back to Slammer in search of a second ride. This time I was more fortunate, although the wait was considerably longer. I got the leftmost seat on the back row of the paddle on the X:\NWO side. The queueline announcements assure riders that each seat offers the same ride experience. As anybody with any knowledge of physics will tell you, that’s bollocks. The back row is about 10ft higher/lower than the front row at the top/bottom of the rotation and is considerably more intense.
2pm had arrived and I had already spent longer in the park than I had intended, so I made my way to the car park, via the Rush construction site.
Rush has arrived and construction is progressing quickly. Its two towers are in place and the queueline brickwork (oh yes sir, none of your cheapo tarmac here) is being laid. Already it has become the focal point of the Dome end of the Lost City, even though it’s not yet at full height. Rush is shaping up to be another worthy addition to Thorpe’s collection of flats. Mind you, that’s what we said about Samurai.
Photos from today are available here.