Recent content by Howie

I'm not sure what exactly, but something has happened to Thorpe Park. I was there on Tuesday with @Rollercoaster David and @JoshC. Had a really great day, got tons of rides in. Ok, the park was actually really quiet so queues were small anyway... but it was more than that. Despite the low...

Storm Chaser (The Paulton's one). It's excellent... as a family coaster. I mean, it's quite a short ride, and it doesn't seem to spin very much - on one lap me and Dr Dave spent literally the entire circuit facing backwards (probably the 'drag' factor from having 2 old fat blokes sitting...

Well... you did ask. Tell me you didn't sing along. 😁

I'll just leave this here:

No. Bollocks to the "great reset", I refuse to be conditioned/coerced into lowering my expectations on what life should be. Kondaa, Velocicoaster, Pantheon... as soon as one of those bad boys becomes 'accessible' I'm off, before that monumental prick BloJo finds another excuse to lock us down again.

Extra flat rides. 80's throwbacks. Later opening hours. Lots of good news here. My only gripe is... why stop at 3 temporary rides? Why not 4, or 5, or even 6? It's not like fairground rides are exactly in high demand at the moment, I'm sure they could have found a couple more. Maybe even a...

I swear some bigwig somewhere is scouring forum topics for old Howie posts in search of new business ideas - I said this years ago. In fact, I said it as soon as me and the wife turned up at the Studio Tour itself back in 2014 and clocked those big, empty, otherwise useless fields next to the...

Monster and The Smiler are two really good shouts. Two more examples that spring to mind, both of which are in Sweden funnily enough, are Helix and Wildfire. Like, I don't even know how they got heavy machinery and lifting equipment in those tight, hilly spaces to install the thing. Taking...

B&M hyper trains are really long though, right? So no matter how accurate the parabolic curve of the airtime hill may be, there can only one specific part of the train that experiences the perfect 0g. I'm no engineer, but I would assume the calculation point would be somewhere near the middle of...

Hyper- Dermic Needle Mountain, anyone? Indiana Jones and the Syringe of Terror? Around the World in 80 Doses? Pirates of the AstraZeneca? There must be more...

That... that is not a T Rex. 😕

Speed, Oakwood for strength. Nash for quantity I reckon, although it's a large quantity of the very worst kind of airtime. Neither of these is making me feel particularly proud to be British right now. Forget Brexit and the 'Rona fiasco, it's our lack of decent airtime that really lets this...

Presumably the digital park maps are downloadable, yes? Can't you just print one off at home? Get some nice thick, shiny paper, laminate it, boom, job done. Don't ask me, I'm just an old guy, but I thought that's how you crazy kids did things these days? 🤔

Official figures aside, Europa Park stands out in my memory as being the pinnacle of efficient operations. Euro Mir's queue never stops moving, the mine train is in the station roughly 20 seconds before it's off again but, as others have said, Silver Star is the one to beat. That thing devours...

"Broms". If you know, you know.