Richard

We’re always open to guest contributions if there’s something we’ve missed. Not much we can do in another state if the parks’ communications teams don’t reach out and help make it happen.

There was some spam removed from this thread over the weekend which might have caused this. I've just tried permanently deleting the posts rather than hiding it like we normally do, so let me know if it happens again in coming days.

Absolutely. Just as it's premature to write off an unfinished building, I'm certainly not going to defend it just yet. I'll be the first to call it out if the end product falls short of expectations. The only thing I was asked not to photograph or discuss in detail is the final theming, but there's probably a few things I can say: Vertical gardens will feature prominently around the ride as per the concept model. Hopefully real, not fake. Maintenance/inspection requirements will limit what they can do with bare patches on the slab. They need to be able to crane in boom lifts etc. The concepts I have seen for the pre-ride/station area are surprisingly fully realised. I'm told everything I was shown is now locked in and most of it has been fabricated/rendered.

That’s the maintenance shed not the station. It’s in a back of house area so it’s probably worth seeing what they do with sight lines within the park before tearing it to shreds. The actual station will be hidden further from view behind it. And spoiler: it’ll be fully enclosed to facilitate theming and AV elements.

I did actually mean to say something about that because specific mention was made of tidying up the old mess of paths and there's every indication it'll all be open and one seamless area. Black Hole's refurbishment last year for instance included some new pathways to facilitate this.

What are your suspicions?

No it doesn't. It points out that pandemic related delays gets us to now, but the further delays to April seem to be driven by business decisions. Hence the article expressly stating that decisions were almost certainly made amid lockdowns and the shambles of a vaccine rollout months ago. Disagree with the decisions all you want, just acknowledge when they would likely have been made. It's literally in the first sentence that Village are relying on a slate of other new attractions without the coaster. The entire premise is that there's every possibility it'll be a decent summer for Village without Leviathan, and likely even a better summer for Dreamworld as a result. No one's blaming timber shortages. It was outright dismissed as a plausible reason for delays; we all saw how construction progressed at a steady pace once it started (albeit behind schedule). There's possibilities that the timber cost more than originally planned and that may have affected when and how it was supplied (depending on contracts, who's fitting the bill for market fluctuations etc.), but it has never been unobtainable. You're right that shipping delays probably ended up having about the same impact on Steel Taipan and Leviathan given physical construction on both wrapped up around the same time. Despite the non-committal "late" provided publicly, Steel Taipan was absolutely planned to be operational by September 2020. Leviathan was originally earmarked for December 2020. Make of that what you will; it's splitting hairs when both rides have suffered different avoidable and unavoidable delays. This article is entirely my words and opinions. I speak with industry sources all the time but no one person, company or viewpoint coloured this article. Most of it is simply educated speculation and I'm not exactly going out on a limb with any of it. The first 750 words are a play-by-play of avoidable and unavoidable delays over the past few years. The remainder is a fairly succinct synopsis of what summer will look like for VRTP, including the thin attraction count and the optics of numerous dormant rides at Sea World, while also spelling out how Dreamworld will benefit here. I called it a comedy of errors in the second last sentence... who's this apparent puff piece for exactly? Is there a particular piece of information you think is wrong, or that I chose to omit or spin? Is something more sinister at play with the delays?

If you think there’s an interesting story about this being delayed amid a global pandemic that has delayed virtually every other attraction on the planet then I’m all ears. I personally don’t think the narrative is anywhere near as compelling as Sky Voyager’s delays amid years of mismanagement and a botched recovery plan, but each to their own. I genuinely encourage any of you to write such a piece and send it through if you think it’s of interest — I’d be more than happy to publish a well written piece on the subject. Given that @TimmyG and @Tinter were both previously banned from this site I’m not too surprised that they are back with the same tired ‘Parkz is biased’ stuff. One created fake accounts to cause trouble, lied about it repeatedly when asked and ultimately got themselves banned only to create a whole fake persona to rejoin and lie to me yet again about who they were. The other just seems to enjoy disrupting this community for fun. They’re also both behind the Golden Years Facebook page but that’s neither here nor there in their banning, though it does provide context and likely motives for their undermining behaviour. Neither have reached out to apologise, clarify or justify their past actions. At some point it’s just plain harassment though and I’ll reiterate that it’s not something we are entertaining anymore.

More than just a clearance issue – it tried to pass straight through a support column for the track below: https://www.parkz.com.au/photo/14866-DC_Rivals_HyperCoaster_construction/gallery/sort/newest/location/dc-rivals-hypercoaster/offset/207 The ride also had a major section of track removed for reprofiling a year or so after it opened: https://www.parkz.com.au/article/2018/08/24/620-Track_comes_down_from_DC_Rivals_HyperCoaster_during_annual_maintenance.html Even if the design process is perfect (and as we see, it's glaringly not), there can still be flaws that appear during fabrication, shipping, ride construction as well as theming/landscaping construction. There's also the fact that you probably also want to double check that the train can be safely winched around the track, because there's basically a 100% chance that it will stall at some point during its 30-odd year life.

Our position on this remains. This forum is not for policing, witch-hunts or politics. Assume people are capable of doing the right thing. Assume local authorities are ensuring people are doing the right thing within their community. It's really not hard. Take your frustrations about government or society elsewhere because if you post it here it will be removed.

Bring it up in the appropriate section of the forums if you wish to discuss further.

Agreed. Lumping everything under "theme park" or "ride" has largely been done for expediency and this terminology is slowly being replaced across the site in favour of "attraction". But members can indeed submit changes/additions to the database and there's currently nine categories for parks to choose from, including both theme and amusement.

The default assumption is that everyone in this community is an adult capable of understanding and following laws and restrictions. We welcome the sharing of content provided it's on-topic. This forum is not a place for policing, witch-hunts or politics and we'll continue to remove this kind of off-topic nonsense.

After the fact, absolutely. Sounds like the necessary boxes are being ticked. But the suggestion was that WHSQ were happy simply by virtue of being informed of the incident and because luckily no one was injured. This is objectively not true given a presumably preventable incident occurred that resulted in notices.

Three safety notices over an incident is objectively not “WHSQ are happy”.