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No Flee it wasn't you I was refering to as being harsh. I was talking about the original post refering to the Security guard making stuff up to impress bimbos, which is what was implied.

I know I say a lot of negative stuff about the park these days... I do really like the park which is why it makes me so sad to see what has become of it. This being said though I have always thought management handled early closes and incliment weather very well. In this situation I don't see any change from that, just because 1 person who visits the park every week was slightly inconvenienced I don't see such a fuss needs to be made. Even the fact that the security man went out of his way to check that you weren't going to be stuck there says a lot. And he was probably doing the same for the 'bimbos' as you said it (pretty harshly i think). If I had been heading out to the park in bad weather I would have taken the time to call and check they were open. In the past I have done so and they have been honest and said yes we are opening but closing at 2 or something like that given the weather. Very well handled Wonderland! I'm also delighted to see they are working on cleaning up the probe! Even if they didn't bother to paint where the beacon used to be :-)

I would say for sure that the numbers that are being quoted by the IAAPA about WS are true. Its not just a matter of picking a number and giving it to them, those sorts of things would be checked. Its just like any incorporated company, you have to report to the Government every year and things like attendance need to be provided. This also works the same with Insurance, banks and everything like that so they would be the numbers. I would also be pretty certain that yes this does include the Wildlife park figures. Its pretty easy to pick up numbers there because you might have a whole heap of coaches come through for only a few hours each in one day. On thing to be said about attendance though... Yes it may still be quite easy for WS to generate resonable attendance numbers and YES they may be quite high at the moment compared to times in the past. However, I would be more interested to look at the REPEAT ATTENDANCE figures. It is easy in any business to get a customer once, but you have to provide them with a decent product to get them to keep coming back to you... Its this I think we should all be looking at as oposed to straight up single day attendance numbers...

Order placed :-) ...okay order not placed! It really makes me cranky we people choose to set up a service that does not accept AMEX cards. There are thousands and thousands of amex users in the world and excluding them only takes away from your business. Guess I'm going to have to sort out some other payment method, a pain in the arse to say the least.

Well I will go on DJV is 8 years time because its one of the best coasters I've had the pleasure of riding. I don't see anything like it from the other manufacturers. I also don't think its fair to judge the state of the ride in the future till we get there do you? As previous posters have said, you have to judge such things on a case by case basis. Lets face it, although Beamers are typicaly nice and smooth they are not doing anything really radical for the most part are they? Most of their models are improvements on something another company has initialy developed. Where as companies like Arrow, Vekoma and Intamin are pushing the boundries and bringing out new rides.

Before we all go jumping on the 'praise B&M dump on Vekoma' bandwagon again I'll just say that despite being a great ride I got a severe earbashing off Scream earlier this year. So its not just as cut and dry as One = all good, one = all bad. I'll just say this, at least Vekoma have done well and got some coasters into this country, without them lets see how many we can quicly get rid of! MW = no coasters DW = 1 coaster WL = no looping coasters WOW sounds exciting to me!

Ugly yes but still an awsome ride. A lot could be done to dress up the ride and make it much less of an eyesore. The thing is Dreamworld (well at least as its come across to me) has always been the main ride park with theming as oposed to the other which are theme parks with rides and that's where its priorities are. I think this is a good thing as you have variety up there. And lets face it, TOT is a bloody ugly ride too, it really spoilt the arials of the park and ruined the atmosphere of the Model Ts. But I certainly wouldn't not have it :-)

My vote goes for Cyclone. I will however say that I much prefered Big Dipper ove Cyclone as its layout worked much better with the tight surroundings of Luna Park and the speed as well. It didn't do anywhere near as much for me in its present form. For starters (although maybe not now but certainly initialy) Cyclone is a much smoother ride it glides around the track a lot better than the Deamon train which is more thrown through the elements. Second, it contains a lot more variety than Demon does simply from its larger layout and longer ride time. As for the ride itself I'd say Cyclone is the more attractive of the two with its nice painted track and clean look. Demon has a lot more hardware involved with the lifting mechanics, valley platform and staircase in the boomerang and all that which I don't think looks all that attractive. However the surroundings for Deamon do it a lot more justice when compared to dirt and road as Richard said. When it comes to themeing I'm not even considering it because IMO you can't just theme a coaster by theming the que and the station. Either the entire ride is themed or it gets no points at all. At the end of the day no matter what you do to the station if you then just have a heap of track there it doesn't really achieve a lot. Finaly, the Vekoma Boomer is the single most cloned coaster in existance so theres nothing really even remotely special about it so that comes into it for me too.

Well I think it could be themed as easily as a coaster can, thing is would Dreamworld bother with either? Most likely we would see a coaster with some nice grounds and a themed station and then just the coaster running around it... In that case all of the ground level part of the ride could be themed just as well. It wouldn't be too hard to theme the lift and hill I wouldnt think though, just look at Seaworld and all that fibreglass around BT...

Congratulations! I think you may have just thought of the perfect ride to replace 'da bolt.' I for one would LOVE to see this ride built at Dreamworld, it would fit in with the whole new theming of the area and it is a pretty wicked ride. I will agree that I would have been no wetter jumping in a pool with my clothes on but that is just fantastic in itself. You think you are soaked and then POW the wall of water lands in your lap and your a whole new level of drenched. I don't know about how the restraints would be handled here...new country, new set of rules. The system at Knotts doesn't make any sense to me at all. You have 2 rides which feature the same degree of drop (Xcel and PP) with the same seating/restrain system. However PP has an accident so they are made to add the harnesses but Xcel is not...I can't work that one out. I'm really interested in the idea of PP at DW, and as they already have a good buying relationship with Intamin it could be very possible. What does everyone else think?

NO WAY! The 2 best attractions at Luna Park are easily the Rotor and Coney Island...WHY?? Because they are something different. You can ride your carnival crap rides anywhere but Coney Island is a park of history and IMO in its current state far exceeds anything a coaster would do for the park.

I figured that would probably have made use of the space however as you say I think there is more than enough room to work in a decent river caves attraction. Having never been to the original (pre95) park what are the tunnels you speak of? Is that where the origian RC used to run? Where exactly did they route the original ride?

Yeah I remember that show back from the 90s when I was little Richard. It was actualy really good and pretty funny in the typical family orientated slapstick way. Captain Sturt used to be a really great attraction...even if it does run on tracks HEHEHE

It all sounds very well structed and interesting Richard, can't wait for it to come online. Look forward to hopefully being able to contribute to the site in any way I can. Just slightly off topic and I won't mention anymore about it but does anyone (particularly Shaun) know of a similar forum discussing the portable segment of the industry?

I thought the Wizards Fury was a great ride, it offer something a bit different. I really wish they hadn't gotten rid of it. Aparently it was for maintanace reasons which I guess it fair enough, it was pretty old. However there are an awful lot of Schwarzkopf rides still out there operating. I'd probably guess it was more a matter of WL not wanting to pay to keep it maintained as oposed to it not being possible to keep running any more.

As I was saying before I'd really like to see them put in a really kick arse re-make of the River Caves. NSW is really lacking a decent water ride, well if you don't count Snowy (its rapids not a boat ride) we don't actualy have 1 at all. There is a fair bit of space they could use, after all there is the area vacated by the Big Dipper down the side and out the back where the big turnaround used to be... Don't know what that area is doing in the park now but that coupled with the space already in the mountain could work well.

I've been visiting Dreamworld ever since I was a little lad (not that I'm that much bigger now ) back when they first opened (both TRR and EM opened at the same time) and the cars have always had 4 riders per car in two compartments... I do remember how they changed Thunder River though, much prefered the rotating station, same goes for Snowy at WL. I'm glad Sea World kept this system when they did BT.

Im not forgetting about the mouse at all, its a great ride, mostly because of its age. The thing is its just that, it is getting on a bit and it wouldn't hurt the park to have more than 1 major ride like that. I think the only reason Rail Chase has been brought up is that is was so rediculously cheap and thus it would be a fairly good return on investment. I would have actualy thought RC was one of the more popular rides at SW. Simple fact is the park couldn't get away with another large outdoor coaster and they don't have the space to build a big looper indoors. If they did want to build another coaster they would have to go for something of the Wild Mouse type variety, that doesn't mean it has to be dodgy though. As I said before though, I would sooner see other things at the park over another coaster.

I would be inclined to agree that yes an indoor type coaster could be quite viable within the park and could probably be quite easily mixed in with the circus theming. Something like rail chase could have been perfect and could even have been combined both in and outdoors as the initial sections of the ride would have generated little noise with the later sections contained inside. Something to also be noted is a coaster with this style of vehicle (single cars as opposed to a large train) would generate a lot less human noise as you don't have that mass of people at once that you get with something like cyclone. I am also very eager to see the River Caves re-introduced, probably more so than another coaster. Ever since they opened the pervious Luna Park incarnation there were plans to build it but it never eventuated. I think something with a bit more thrill than the original would go great. My thoughts would be something in the style of Pirates at Disney as this is an indoor ride with still some great drops etc. Obviously the theming wouldn't be quite as outlandish but it could still be done well. All of this is great however IMO the best thing about Luna Park is the original stuff like the Rotar and Coney Island, was never much interested in the 'carnival' type rides.

Actualy with a proper AV maintenance team as Wonderland should have things like getting monitors and lights working is a pretty simple job. There isn't much that can go wrong with those sorts of systems. There is just no excuse for bad or non existant ride upkeep. If you don't have the ability to properly maintain the rides they should never be built in the first place.

Well yes obviously as your saying Daniel someone who isn't trained can't be rotated. However if WL were running the correct number of staff there would be 4 on probe and at least the Unload, Pre-Show, and person at the Tunnel entrance could be rotated. As for the actual Op. that would be something that would have to be looked at in terms of rotation. However it is done at other parks so I'm sure there is a way.

Yeah its pretty much a whole 'nice in a perfect world' type senario. In the old days where you at an op. at the que, and op. in pre-launch, and 2 in launch with air-con that functioned it made sense. These days the suits are just the tip of the ice-burg with whats wrong with the thing. The right way to do it is as I said above with staff working space-probe for a whole shift, and rotating to other rides the next day. You can still do rotation that way by rotating the SP ops around the different stations of the ride. But hey its been a long time since WL management had things working the right way!

Hi Daniel I wasn't bagging out the ops themselves, they only follow orders. I was talking about managements aproach to the ride crew. It wouldn't be hard to have staff change for rotation, its only a jump suit, SW do it with BT don't they?

Okay as Daniel says the theming is in a bad condition...I heven't been to WL for a while now and they are really going to have to pull something out to get me back there. I was pretty disgusted on my last visit. When I was there a few flashing lights worked, there was rubbing everywhere, the lights on the doors didn't work and yeah the roof didn't work, and the crew just treat it as a ride not a theme... As for the theming itself no its nothing great. I'm sorry but I work in the business and a few orange beacons and some blue lights don't cut it as decent theming. The roof never closed after launch, it opened just before launch, locked open and then closed once the 'catchers' had returned to the station. Giant drop isn't half finished it wasn't suposed to be heavily themed, therefore I say SP is half finished because it was suposed to be heavily themed but it was pretty second rate. The staff play a part in theming, and basicaly wonderland's don't so there you go. The hood doesn't count because as this thread has showed just as many people like it as don't. Yes Space Probe WAS first, thats the point it was a fantastic concept. Dreamworld were able to go ahead and improve upon that concept and build a superior ride. Just as they did with Superman the escap from SFMM. Doesn't mean that Superman is now a crap ride, just means it has been bettered. Now this is just my opinion so I'm not saying anything against anyone who disagrees with me. However I don't think any 'thrill' ride like these can be themed to any great detail. At the end of the day the ride shoots up a pole and comes back down. Its the same for most coasters, you can themed the station all you want but at the end of the day you then dispatch a train around a track. I don't have a problem with this, thats the idea with rides. Some (like scooby) are theme based rides, others (like TOT) are thrill rides. Why waste your time doing a dodgy job of trying to theme something that doesn't realy need it. Better off putting the money into another more suitable attraction. But again unlike what I've said above thats just my opinion.