Dreamworld 1981

[Jakev8]

^your thoughts are not suprising - DW has had more than it's fair share of avoidable accidents in the past involving the Thunderbolt, Chair lift, Cannonball Express & Blue Lagoon amongst them. I have to admit the incidents of the past still haunt me for a split second when I board the Giant drop today. This is an interesting topic because I think it is fueled by peoples dreams for Dreamworld to be so much better than it actually is. Let's hope the place holds a brighter future. I still have faith it somehow will.. OnedayBy the way I agree with MYK about WWW. -Drove past the place the other day and it's looking suprisingly faded & worn. Not a very good first impression

Any1 know anymore info about the thunderbolt and Cannon ball Express accidents? Onley ever know about the chairlift and the chopper crash

[MickeyD]

Sure! I can tell you some about these incidents, if it bleeds, it leeds so say the media ;-)

- The Cannonball express accident happened during park hours when the second train was being fed onto the track. As the operating train full ofhappy Guest's passed Blue Lagoon, rail house and turning right under Rocky Hollow Bridge it was jacknifed by the other train that was being switched onto the main circuit. The operating train was shunted off to the right driver side and other passenger rail cars also thrown on their side

The train driver was airlifted to Hospital with suspected neck injuries. Noone else was badly injured, I believe

This happened around the mid 90'S

The Thunderbolt accident occurred when a waiting female rider fainted, fell forward and onto the track at the loading platform and was cleaned up by the oncoming train returning to the station. I believe it pushed her some way down from where she fell outside the control booth. For whatever reason, there was no attempt made to estop the ride and avoid her injuries (busted ribs from memory?)

Lucky the girl wasn't killed..

Not surprisingly, both incidents made the news. After that accident, riders would have to wait back in the queue and counted through only after the train was stationary

Air gates were eventually installed yet the practice of keeping riders off the station platform remained in place regardless

I remember we had these newspaper ads on display at the fishbowl staff noticeboard when I worked in ops at MW. A reminder of how not to run a theme park perhaps? Unfortunately for DW, they always seemed to be good at making the news for all the wrong reasons and as the competition, we liked them to know it ;-)

[Jakev8]

Holy crap

[DaptoFunlandGuy]

I've never heard the detail about the thunderbolt incident... when did it happen? I recall Wonderland upgrading air-gates to 'full-height' jail-bars at one point... and i'm wondering if that incident had anything to do with it (because all wonderland's coasters were 'queue for the row you want' type stationhouses - similar to how lethal was before they introduced a grouper.

[Reanimated35]

Weird that you say both incidents made the news but neither seem to show up in a google search. Thought that thing would have been catalogued. If you can narrow it down so I can search though old news papers though?

[Jakev8]

Yeh same I tried to find more info, but there's nothing on google about any of these incidents

[DJKostya]

Try the National Library of Australia's Trove collection. It is the digitised collection of everything that the National Library has. Under legislation they are required to have all newspapers.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/

[jjuttp]

I did a quick scan through the 90's, and found nothing citing an "accident", or along the lines of.

[MickeyD]

Interesting that no such articles showed up? The train crash was on the front page of the GC bulletin (slow news week??) and like I said, we has the clippings displayed in the 'chap' office as we used to call it behind the roxy. I can only assume the incidents occurred mid 90'S and as Alexb suggested may have influenced the decision for airgates on future coasters. Like I said a young female was involved in the Thunderbolt incident and train driver was the only major injury that resulted in his subsequent hospitalisation (airlifted as I recall). All I can suggest is maybe verify this with someone else who worked at DW (or even MW management) at the time?

[Reanimated35]

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to say you're making it up, I'm just quite surprised I can't find news of it anywhere.

[MickeyD]

^ sorry if I sounded defensive haha no, just trying to tie in what was going on at the time, maybe jerk someone's memory out there? Trouble is theme park nuts like us didn't really exist back then - maybe I'm just plain weird remembering shit like this. Vast majority of people really wouldn't care enough about this kind of stuff to remember it

Yup, definitely weird;-)

[Jakev8]

Hey does any1 remember the old Pirate show that used to be we're tiger island is, going right back to the early 90's From what I can remember it was pretty good show...