Richard

The ride was obviously deemed safe and reliable by the powers that be because it existed and operated in the first place. Evidently it wasn't entirely safe and reliable, because this incident took place. So therefore to reopen they would need to satisfy everyone involved that the causes of this incident have been rectified and the ride once again can be considered safe and reliable. Nothing is perfect, mistakes can be learnt from and improvements can be made...

​Yes and no. Older steel coasters like Cyclone or Arkham Asylum featured welded track. But so did perfectly smooth B&M coasters from these days. The fabrication tolerances were generally good enough though that the track fit together pretty perfectly as designed and the welds could be made seamless. In Cyclone's case, most of its roughness comes from just the primitive way in which they designed rides. They never got transitions very good, and you can see looking at its track that it's not smoothly designed. The train bounces around not because the welds are rough but because it just doesn't follow a smooth, natural course. Arkham Asylum is a different beast. The quality of track design is superb -- the SLC was designed by Werner Stengel whose company is behind basically every highly praised B&M or Intamin coaster out there. The Vekoma trains were just never any good and couldn't handle what is a particularly intense but well-designed layout. The KumbaK train does the job better but more in the way that it restrains you so you don't feel it as much. The rough welds you might see on Arkham would be outside of the path of the ride wheels where the welds are ground smooth. Thunderbolt was an example of a badly designed ride where the track fabrication was so poor that you could very clearly see feel the welds in every piece of track. It wasn't a ride that deteriorated over years, it was a really badly designed coaster with horrible trains and painful restraints for its entire life.

Yep -- it won't reopen until they have satisfied the maintenance technicians, park and manufacturer engineers, lawyers, insurance companies and bean counters. They may well make a statement or media appearances, but either way its reopening suggests that both a theme park and ride manufacturer -- neither of which can exist without offering safe, reliable rides -- have deemed it to be safe.

That interview is crazy! Here you have a CEO taking responsibility for the incident offering complete humility and substance, and an interviewer hellbent on keeping things going around in circles to try and make some ridiculous point about safety that makes absolutely no sense. You have to applaud the Alton Towers/Merlin response in all this. Really offering a level of public responsibility for the incident that you don't typically see. Certainly different from say a Disney response. Australia's media lost all interest in Green Lantern within a day or two, so we never saw an actual public response from VRTP.

The film was a criminal waste of Rowan Atkinson's talent. That's enough reason to hate it.

The stupidity of the British press is mind-numbing. The overall theme of their questioning to Alton Towers officials is that this ride was an accident waiting to happen, based on a series of minor, anecdotal incidents. It would be nice to see them swap the faux hard-hitting journalist routine for a discussion with independent industry engineers, who could dismiss these previous incidents for red herrings that they are so that the media narrative could focus on coming the the bottom of what happened this week. The black and white answer is obviously that either a computer or human made a mistake. But in the case of the latter I suspect there are grey areas at play here, such as how or why the computer system was able to be overridden, or if it faulted in allowing such an override to take place. Reports suggested it had just come out of a period of downtime, so there could well have been maintenance technicians present who do have the ability and authority to operate the ride in a manual mode. Or there may well be policies in place at Alton Towers that allows ride supervisors or operators to make manual maneuvers.

I haven't seen much evidence of adult behaviour in here today. Keep things on-topic and respectful and we won't delete posts. A bunch of insults and memes isn't the level we're striving for as a community. See here for more information.

The ride's theme is vague enough that it really doesn't rely on the film in any way. Even if you've seen the film, the tie-in doesn't go much further than "oh, those are the carriages from the movie". The theming is immersive and impressive enough as is, I can't see any reason or way to add more to it beyond giving the AV in the coaster section a complete revitalisation. It is worth pointing out however that the ride's own signage betrays this separation between cartoon and film. The cringe-worthy Scooby-Doo portrait replaces the old cringe-worthy AOL sponsorship logo.

Restored this photo for the sake of the discussion. The photo was originally deleted along with with the topic about this.

I don't think the temporary boarded up door in any way/shape/form fit the theme. I also think staff at theme parks -- all staff from cleaners to CEOs -- absolutely should care about little things like how a door looks to guests. Not because a tacky patch-job will impact a guest's day or make the park less money (but things like this certainly add up), but because an employee who is noticing and caring about things like this obviously has pride in their job and is in the business of customer satisfaction. It looked ghetto before, and thankfully they decided to do it properly. But if we're singing the park praises for this sort of thing then the bar is kind of low isn't it?

Just a hunch, but a system that uses optical sensors completely separate to the ride system would be the way I'd do it for ease of installation, maintenance plus the fact that if they had gotten the ride manufacturer Mack involved it'd surely add much more to the cost and complication than if they went with local theming contractors or even in-house electricians/AV guys to set it up as its own standalone system.

We've tried again with the forum upgrade -- for those that didn't catch it we tried this a few days ago and ran into some issues to reverted to the original. We've fixed this bugs and tried again -- it appears everything has gone to plan. Obviously things are very different. The new version of the software is much more mobile-friendly and makes things like uploading attachments a breeze. In generally it should make the forums much more easy-to-use and engaging, though obviously it'll take some getting used to. You'll notice some posts don't look right. Please let us know... screenshots etc. really help! Some things will be automatically fixed with time by the system (right now it's slowly converting some things to the new format/layout), others we'll need to address manually. For the interests of keeping things in one place, please post bugs/errors/issues in this thread here.

Cyclone was pretty much the quintessential example of Dreamworld theming... ridiculously overthought plot and built to a budget with no thought as to how (or if) it'll last. A good chunk of the ideas were simply swiped from Universal Studios Orlando's Twister attraction, to the point where the gift shop was a 100% knockoff...

To me Justice League is an average ride that's really well themed, and it's the ride system where it falls short. Things like the starfish don't bother me a whole lot -- they made a call to not want human/gun-based violence, which is fair enough -- but trundling along in those dinky cars just sucks the energy out of the ride. Oceaneering type vehicles would no doubt have added significantly to the ride's budget, but I feel that the end result would be a hugely popular and enjoyable family ride that could well be Movie World's flagship ride, rather than an easily forgotten, nicely themed ride.

I think small flat rides like Batwing are exactly what Movie World needs more of. The old western area is long overdue for a redevelopment. It's entirely abandoned almost all the time, pales in comparison to the "new" western area that came with Wild West Falls and serves no real purpose. The next logical move for Movie World would be to gut this whole area and give it a new theme (Mad Max could be a really effective, seamless transition from the western area), put on a decent stunt show or major indoor ride in the arena and a well-themed flat ride outside it. The graveyard can be relocated to the hill beside Wild West Falls, which easily removes the only thing of interest in this area.

I can't think of a better attraction for Movie World than a storyline based Mad Max show bringing back actual human stunts. It's a concept that is simply perfect for a HSD replacement... or even something in the unused Western arena given HSD doesn't seem to be going anywhere, though the necessary fire and pyrotechnics for this theme may be harder in this venue. But for some reason I feel that the powers that be instead would instead decide that this iconic Australian franchise would be better put to use in a tacky once-a-day Main Street lipsynced/choreographed dance-fight show...

Between Disney's recent reboot, the Wicked musical and of course the ubiquitous original film I'd say it's a brand that's still very much relevant. I however doubt Movie World in 2015 has the creative gusto to be able to pull off anything like this well, and it's really a brand that should either be done amazingly or not at all. Movie World has a Dirty Harry bar, a Casablanca restaurant and an entire area and major attraction modeled after 1950s westerns. There's a handful of WB properties that are timeless, and Wizard of Oz would definitely fit the bill. It wouldn't be the worst thing to see Movie World take a break from comic books and video games to try something with a bit of longevity once again.

Basically they are going out of their way to make it as vague as possible. I assume by 'new' passholders they mean passholders who renew and as such have a new pass for 2015/16, who aren't really new passholders by any reasonable definition. The plan I expect will be to offer an event pass addon for ~$50, and they have some clever strategy that involves withholding this fact to drive sales at the $75 renewal price and only mention the event tickets closer to Halloween. Because consumers love to be withheld information and charged more later...

Article has been updated with new concept art of the new rides/attractions.

The area will include new rides (the article has been updated to suggest this). The thing with children's rides is that there's very little needed by way of foundations, electricity etc. Also remember that work has been quietly underway for a while now.

Information is still coming through... hopefully by the end of today we'll see some artwork.

No reputable ride manufacturer would recommend anything other than tearing down the entire thing and starting from scratch. As we mentioned on our Facebook page, it's also worth keeping in mind that Anthea Hammon is currently on the board of directors at AALARA. That the two crossed paths at the conference could have plenty of explanations. Of course no matter the reason for getting to know each other, there's absolutely no doubt that the question "what can Premier Rides do for Scenic World?" has been asked.

I have no objections to an annual pass costing the same or less than a single day, particularly because a day ticket is so expensive at our parks. I had a Universal Studios Hollywood pass once because it cost the same as a day ticket. The same year I also had a Six Flags pass that cost marginally more than a day ticket and gave me access to every Six Flags park in the country. It's really not unheard of, and given the inflated day ticket price of our tickets, the actual level of discounting is not drastic. If a tourist -- or even a local planning a one-off visit -- is buying an annual pass instead of a day ticket, what is the likelihood that they'll use the pass to the point where it negatively impacts the company's balance sheet? Pretty low. There's no fair way of making more money from tourists than locals... again unless they had peak/off-peak passes that meant that tourists in the peak do pay more, just like they do for accommodation, flights, etc. The figure I'd really like to see is average number of visits per pass. I would guess that despite the many families who look like they're just there to get their money's worth (cheap refill drink bottle in hand, kids that look barely excited to be at a theme park, lunch in a cooler in the car), the average person is using it 2-3 times total and probably dropping $20-30 each visit on food and merch. As for throwing in the bring-a-friend deal, I suspect they're really banking on getting as many of these people as possible to upgrade to their own while they're there with friends who have the pass. Not to mention it's the lowest period of the year, so giving the gate away is probably not going to have much of an impact or cost to the parks' operations, and it'll surely boost F&B/merch revenue. I think the economics is there for cheap passes, I just think they're missing a huge opportunity without peak restrictions.

They're selling ad space to local businesses now? If that's theming, then you should check out my local football club... That's honestly one of the tackiest things I've ever seen.

I've got no objections to the $75 pricetag on the passes. But I absolutely agree that this new lowered pricing could have reintroduced restricted peak season in a palatable way, which is so clearly needed not only for crowd control but would be a no-brainer for increasing revenue. The issue when they first introduced $99 passes with lockout periods was that idiots who hadn't read the terms got angry when they weren't allowed on. The solution is nothing more than a very clear box they have to tick when they purchase the passes, a verbal confirmation when they process the pass, big bold "THIS PASS IS NOT VALID IN PEAK PERIODS" written on the pass and then flexible and reasonably affordable upgrade option. How long until we see paid parking subsidizing these ridiculous low ticket prices? They've surely reached the limit of cutting costs and raising prices inside the parks. (Someone quote me on that when I'm proven wrong.)