Fans of all things rockety and coastery can guarantee their place on Thorpe Park’s latest and greatest, Stealth, any day this season in exchange for some cold hard cash.
It appears the days of free Fastrack tickets are well and truly over.
The Rialto booking system is now offering an adult 1 day ticket and a paid-for-queue-jumping ticket to (near to) the front of the Stealth queue (once during the day, at a time of their choosing no doubt) for the bargain basement price of just �26.00.
When you see the day ticket price on the website this year is �19.95, you realise the incredible value. Only �6.05 for something which would have been free a couple of years ago.
But wait, there’s more value to be had! Fastrack tickets are also available in two packages - Adrenalin (Rush, Slammer, Samurai and Vortex) or Extreme (Colossus, Nemesis Inferno, X:\ No Way Out and a choice of Logger’s Leap or Tidal Wave) - for the even better value �8.05.
I’m not sure whether this is more a testament to Tussauds’ financial greed or the Great British Public’s stupidity. You pay almost �20 to get into a theme park where your admission ticket entitles you to ride the attractions for free all day but then you pay AGAIN for the exact same attactions, albeit with a shorter waiting time assuming lack of breakdowns. And people WILL pay. Twice, for the same thing. Interesting social phenomeon.
And lo sayeth the Thor beast, “I name thee stealthily.”
After much ho humming and rumour-mongering, Project Stealth is today no more. Thorpe have finally released the name for their new toy.
The name of Rita’s Revenge has been much talked about across the internet in recent weeks. Much debate ensued when a photo that seemed to show a partially uncovered sign was uploaded to the Thorpe Park website and then hastily removed. At that point everybody knew that the name started with a letter with a straight edge (ABDEFHIKLMNPRTVW).
Rita’s Revenge will come as no surprise then. Now we can all start debating what the letters stand for.
The coaster has today literally lost its project.
Thorpe’s Project Stealth hit a landmark on Friday (yes, landmark, not landmine) as its first train was launched and made it safely back to the station.
Roll on 15th March…
Took a trip to Thorpe yesterday to take a look at the latest progress on construction of Project Stealth:
A view from Depth Charge
Within a few weeks, it should look something like this
Up close
From a little further away
And further still
Now visible from all over the park
An overview from the Inferno volcano
The airtime hill
… and you’re going to stop people chucking stuff onto the track how?
The base of one of the supports
Hoardings are up all around the park
In full
Close up
Compulsory duck picture
It doesn’t seem very long ago that I was at Thorpe Park, but it was actually last October! Anyway, we had a fantastic day yesterday, in somewhat of a mini heatwave. According to Metcheck, the temperature hit 20�C by early afternoon.
There have been a few changes around the park since last year, most obviously of course the huge area cordoned off behind construction walls. Previously home to Model World, the Sunken Garden and the Flying Fish, the patch of land will next year be occupied by Thorpe’s new rocket coaster, currently codenamed Project Stealth. At the moment, however, its just a rather large patch of dirt, albeit possibly one of the most photographed patches of dirt in Surrey.
Another smaller construction site currently occupies the space vacated by Eclipse when it left the park and hotfooted it across the Chessington over the winter. This will become home to Rush when it eventually arrives in June (according to many of the posters stuck up around the park). Not much to see yet, apart from a few bits of concrete with pipes sticking up.
Slammer, Thorpe’s new Sky Swat, was testing but is not ready to ride yet. At least its conforming, meaning none of the new rides installed at Tussauds’ UK parks this year have opened for the start of the season, whether or not they were originally scheduled to.
There appeared to be staff training going on in the afternoon though, with Samurai being down for ages while staff seemed to be congregating in Slammer’s control box. The water dummies at least were certainly having a good time riding.
A retheme of X:\No Way Out has been a long standing rumour for the last couple of seasons. While this still hasn’t happened, there have been a few “improvements” over the winter. Along with a new bit of queueline, the coaster now has a soundtrack (well, boom boom bass noises anyway). Inside the pyramid itself is an extremely low budget light show. The lights clearly came from Maplin and can’t have cost more than a few hundred pounds. Mind you, thinking about the amount of money spent, this could well be the best value retheme ever. ![[:haha:]](images/smile/smile19.gif)
Unfortunately, Thorpe have missed a golden opportunity to reach out to their new target audience by renaming the ride, so I have decided to do it for them. From now on it will no longer be known as “X colon backslash no way out”, but will be shortened to “ex-colon-chav-slash”. All they need now is neon-blue lights underneath the trains!
Also new for 2005 is a replacement for the Spider-Man show in the arena (”la la la la - Diamonds - cool as ice - la la la la”). They have at last found something half-decent to follow on from the classic Dive Show: Stuntzmania. Rather than trying to come up with a half-arsed storyline, they’ve employed a professional stunt team to put on a half hour show filled with just that - stunts.
Even though we didn’t get to see the full show (they were still building the set mid-morning and the dive pool is not yet filled with water), its a major improvement and definitely something I’ll be making the effort to see again later in the year.
Although (with the exception of the stunt show) there was nothing new on offer at Thorpe yesterday, we had a fantastic day out. Staff were friendly as ever - we got jumped on by Burger King staff all overly-eager to serve us. There was a small amount of downtime here and there, but nothing too substantial. Although at the beginning of the day it was obvious Thorpe were not expecting so many guests (e.g. only running one train on Inferno), they managed to pull off much of the usual magic which makes it a unique park to visit.
If yesterday was an indication of the rest of the season then this will be an awesome year, with memories of disasterous 2004 with a dodgy secondhand ride and events cancellations swept well out of sight.
Photos from Yesterday
Gate Figure: ~6000
Thorpe Park have submitted detailed plans for their 2006 coaster, codenamed Project Stealth, to Runnymede Council.
It’s already induced speculation and controversy across the coaster community, with some people moaning that it is simply a reduced sized clone of Kingda Ka and others moaning that the theming is too similar to Top Thrill Dragster.
What these people seem to have forgotten is, even with the current dollar exchange rate, it’s much more expensive to fly over to the States to ride one of these beasts than go down the motorway to visit Thorpe.
It looks to me like a spectacular reason to renew my Tussauds Annual Pass come 2006!