Yesterday, I took a trip to Thorpe Park to enjoy their pre-season passholders day and the day didn’t disappoint.
Before the preview day, we did receive an email confirming that Detonator, Dodgems, Storm Surge, and Vortex weren’t ready sadly. Vortex was always one of the first rides I would go on during my trips to Thorpe Park beating most of the queues who rush for the popular rollercoasters.
To start the day at 10am, there was a limited number of rides available as the other rides weren’t ready yet including The Swarm which had some kind of issue before opening so it didn’t open until later on in the day sadly.
As a result of the limited number of rides, the rides which were then available did have a larger queue to begin with.
Once the first ‘rush’ had passed with the limited queues and later in the afternoon there were next to no queues on any of the rides, it made for a very enjoyable day including being able to get re-rides on Nemesis Inferno!
During the visit, I managed to enjoy 17 rides on the attractions which was excellent something you would never normally manage to do at the weekend without a fastpass!
I went for a ride on The Swarm and got a rather big surprise by being on the ride, as I got soaked! Yes this year they have turned on a water effect as you pass through the water something which was unexpected so choose wisely where you are going to sit!
Now, I do need to bring this up Derren Brown’s Ghost Train the attraction was available however, while in the queue the attraction did ‘stop working at one point and they didn’t batch anyone into the holding areas and didn’t even make any announcements to say what was going on so an advertised 5 minute queue time turned into over half an hour.
When we eventually got onto DBGT, after you do the first part of the ride (where you get off and back onto it) it then decided to break down! They did get the ride going again which is good but I really do think that the attraction has had its day.
They could easily keep the ride in as the story of it is rather good, but I feel that instead of having it as a VR attraction they should do something similar to how Universal Orlando has the Hogwarts Express attraction and use screens where the windows would be, I feel this would make such an improvement and also increase the reliability of the ride.
It was great with having lovely weather to make the most of the day but most important it was nice to be back at Thorpe Park again for the first visit of the year.
Founder of ThemeParkRM. Spending most of his time at Thorpe Park and loves The Runaway Mine Train at Alton Towers (choo choo!)
