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WnWS\RWS is about the same driving time from Sydney Airport as Six Flags Magic Mountain is from LAX. Wonderland saw regular tourist coaches visiting for day trips, and Scenic World Katoomba - more than twice the driving time - regularly attracts bus tours, day trips and so on. Distance is not a factor - although it would have been wise to push on with a second (dry) gate to make the spot a destination. The fact it was sold to another company doesn't immediately illustrate it as a failure (the fact it was purchased indicates someone thought it had success potential, and village was over leveraged and under capitalised at the time - they needed to free up their bank balance - hence why they sold their oxenford land, WnWS, leased rivals, engaged with buyout offers, etc etc.). The Sydney market has great capacity to sustain theme parks. Wonderland operated for 19 years. Luna Park has had several incarnations and is in the midst of transforming into a new, modern era. Heck, Disney has explored Sydney as an option numerous times, and got really close to breaking ground once too (check out Disney Wharf on YouTube). Your claims WnWS wasn't financially viable don't make out - otherwise Palace wouldn't have purchased and continued to operate it. Villages problems weren't because of WnWS, but they did exacerbate it. Village went into the sydney market with the wrong attitude. They tried to introduce things we'd never seen at the gold coast parks - like RFID bands, paid parking etc - AND they cut costs on everything. Go and look at the concepts for WnW Aussie World, go and find the original WnWS plans, and then look at the concrete jungle we ended up with. The place just wasn't a nice place to visit. And the tower designs - fitting as many slides as they could on one tower - meant queueing was a disaster. Couple that with Village's launch plans - the failed New Years' Eve party in its first season fell devastatingly short of a professional operation, and this immediately soured many local's opinions. If Covid hadn't have come along, I feel strongly we'd have seen early whispers of Palace \ Parques exploring second gate options. Covid has now stuck a pin in that, so it's probably going to be a long time before we see additional development - but that still doesn't point to failure, as the park still continues to operate. Sydney's poor performance with theme parks stems from poor operators, rather than a poor geographical location. You could stick a halfway decent operator in Lithgow, and it'd still be popular. The problem is most definitely not the location or the population.

Gold Coaster opens, Steel Taipan construction progresses at Dreamworld Works on Steel Taipan steadily move forwards while the third iteration of Dreamworlds double looping coaster opens with little fanfare. Click here to continue reading

Hi there all! Just wanna give you another update on the construction! Billy and Andrew were up there to greet me. Not even planned! Demolition of the foundations of Tumble Bug, and of the shed has now begun. The foundations and electrical is now being built as we speak! Lipman have also added DANGER, UNAUTHORISED PERSONS PROHIBITED signs. And more of the same Lipman logo signs near Coney Island. It makes the photos blur basically. And the first ride should be in about 2 weeks time. LPS and Lipman have had a chat with each other to make sure that what happened last time won't happen again. Next update will be whenever I get there! (P.S Coasterlife, 1 week isn't good enough! XD!)

It was really only the twin tube slide tower (I refuse to call them Tower 1, Tower 2 etc 🤢 )that had that issue, but that has since been rectified with additional stairs. The Proslide Towers each had one stair per ride and a separate one for fast track, the Racer/360Rush tower only had the two rides so never a real issue, though i thought it was silly splitting the 360 rush slides on each side because that introduced crowd crossover. The ugly colour scheme of the racer was inspired by NSW surf club cap colours. The park had the wrong concept from the ground up, it was heavily inspired by Sydney beach culture, specifically places like Manly, so the park was modelled LITERALLY off that, from things like the Norfolk pines, to the pavers and sandstone walls, to calling the dining area “The Corso” https://www.google.com/maps/@-33.7943181,151.2874465,2a,60y,359.41h,90.96t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1suAFMLGcypbDmLfcH_TxFOg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 In the end, surprisingly enough, modelling yourself after council open spaces means you too end up feeling like a council park. The park didn’t have enough landscaping…Large expanses of lawns and bark chips so windswept and hot. I think it was overly spread out. Walking 400m from the twin raft slide tower to the T5 tower sucked…No shortcuts etc. Single day tickets were too expensive, ostensibly to get people to buy passes, so you got this weird mismatch. Too expensive for a one day visit, but too far out of the way to make good use of the annual pass. One of the biggest issues was a lack of things for families, and that is a huge sin when it comes to a waterpark IMO. They had some good kids slides, but then the rest of it was a fairly bland splashpad....needed more wading pools, more shade over the splash pad, and of course the main thing, no play structure!

It's what I always hoped VRTP would do with the property. Use WnW as a test case before building a dry park. Question. How much land does the park own to expand on?

It was a concrete jungle, that didn't look nice, had no shade, bad service, asked people to pay for extras that were free at the other park, oversold passes and overcrowded the park. It left a bad taste in the mouth of locals after the first season and it's struggled (I think) to get people to give it another go. That and it appears they didn't much to try and fix the problems, no extra trees planted and no new slides were installed since it opened to give people another reason to give it another go and visit there. So yeah, bottom line is, not great management. If we had of ended up with the original artwork, free parking, not overcrowding or overselling passes and friendly staff, it would have been wildly successful!

Looks like the very end of the shed, a flat roofed extension of sorts. The main shed being the angled roof still visible. There is only the abomination and its carriages, plus the Baldwin steam loco still on site. So they likely don't use the whole area available anymore.

I agree there's no reason that WnWS shouldn't have been able to succeed where it is. I've never been, but Google Maps says it's a 30-minute drive from the CBD. Most visitors to the Gold Coast stay around Surfers Paradise/Southport/Broadbeach. From there, it can easily take 30 minutes to get to Dreamworld depending on where you are. That never detracted from its attendance at its peak. If people want to go to a park, they will go. Like I said, I haven't been to WnWS, so I can't comment like most people can on its operations, but it seems like a bit of a cheap cop-out to blame it on its location and a poor market. Wonderland was right across the road for quite a significant amount of time, and even if Sydneysiders didn't have the stomach for theme parks, it's one of the most visited cities in Australia and should pick up a decent number of tourists. Definitely stinks of poor management and marketing, not a park that was doomed to fail because of aspects out of their control.

See ya later train shed. At least I think that’s what it is...

I've always have had this question fueling in my mind. Personally, I think that probably another incident. Maybe even worse would have happened. But, let's pretend that there was NO INCIDENTS AND THERE NEVER WAS! I think Wonderland would of never been built because it was because of the void of LPS that got Wonderland going in the first place. 7 people would still be around today. A family would not be in smithereens. Probably the owners would of either tried to knock down the park like they tried to do in the early 70s. It may of been successful. But I think that if it stayed. The Big Dipper, the Ghost Train, and the River Caves would have also became heritage listed. I don't think that Maloney's Corner, and Lavender Green would exist in this world. And lots of rides around the front of the park and where the Wild Mouse is today would move around. It would look more like Luna Park Melbourne now basically. But what do you think? And also I want you all to check out this video uploaded by Yyosh. It's about Clive James going into a empty and abandond LPS in 1991 during a storm. It's great, and I think you should watch it too!

Oh hey that's me! All I did was upload a snippet of a TV show ahaha! Thanks... I have thought about this a lot too and there are really three possibilities I come down to. The first is that Luna Park still exists today, but it's very different to what we know it as. The pop-art aesthetic would still exist and the classic rides such as Big Dipper, River Caves and Coney Island may exist. Back in 1979, the owners could have demolished anything they wanted (of course, with public disapproval, but they would probably be allowed to get rid of Coney Island, for example). There were no heritage laws stopping them. Who knows what the owners could've added or removed! The second is the park had another bad accident that causes it to close for good. The owners didn't really give Luna Park the attention it deserved after Ted Hopkins left, and through what I've seen, the place looked run down in the late 70s, even with Martin Sharp's art team. In April of 1979 two trains on Big Dipper collided, and the park hadn't been following fire safety standards. A worse accident could've happened, closing the place for good. The third is just that the park loses attendance and withers away. It's a boring scenario but this shit happens. That was the fate of the original Luna Park in the 40s. In conclusion, Luna Park would be a different place and might not even exist, but there are too many possibilities and I won't be able to even think of them, and you just spend too long reading me rambling on about an amusement park ahaha.

🤔🤔🤔 Which kind??? 🤔🤔🤔 These are my thinking guards. DON'T TOUCH THEM!