Gazza
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Posts posted by Gazza
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Skara Sommarland 17th of July
The day after I went to Tusenfryd I went to Skara Sommarland.
The park is about 120km east of Gothenburg (Where Liseberg is located)
https://www.parkz.com.au/attraction/skara-sommarland
This park was sort of a 50-50 for me in terms of dedicating holiday time.
The main reason to go here to to try Tranan, the worlds only S&S Free Fly coaster, but the park also has a few cool Proslides too, so i decided to give it a few hours. Wouldn’t necessarily be for everyone.
I didn't actually do a whole lot here, most of the rides are fairly generic, but still there was enough to keep me busy.
To get here you can get a train to Skovde (From Gothenburg) and then a bus to the park. Sweden actually has good buses. You’ll see coaches that form part of the local transport system and covered under the same fares that supplement the normal urban buses, and they run at a usable frequency, eg about every hour.
Only hiccup was the day was a Sunday, so trains start later, and I could only get to the park about an hour after opening. Not that it was really a problem.
First impressions is that the place reminded me of a bigger version of Adventure park geelong, lots of open lawns and picnic areas, a few lakes, with a smattering of amusement rides and water slides. They also had cable water skiing and some go kart tracks, so its definitely more amusement park than theme park.
The presentation was ok, they’ve done up some parts, but it still feels like an older park.
I started off with Spinner.
This is a Maurer spinning coaster back before they produced the XC2000 with its overbanked turns and cool stuff. It’s more like a normal wild mouse, but lacking any sort of steep drops. Good bit of spinning, but otherwise nothing to write home about.
Up next was Tranan. I’m glad I got to ride it since I don’t think another one will ever be built, except maybe if a random park in China decides it wants one.
The gimmick is that its kind of like a wing coaster, but the seats stay level like on a suspended coaster / 7 dwarves mine train, so the track can do twists and run inverted or upright, and the cars themselves never go upside down. In particular the twists are interesting because one side of the car goes ‘over the top’ and the other sweeps underneath.
You sit in shallow seats with a seat belt that locks electronically.
Overall, it’s “okay”
Temporarily delving into some physics, but because the seats are so far off the heartline of the coaster, it makes some of the sensations of the ride feel a bit weird and awkward, rather than the “free fly” it purports to be.
You imagine the car going around a corner at a certain speed. The seats on the outside are going around a wider radius, so go ‘faster’, and likewise the seats on the inside follow a smaller radius and go ‘slower’. Its a bit like when you are on a classic Whip ride and get that jerk of acceleration when you go around the pulley at the end.
So because of this you feel lurching like the train is hitting a brake, or accelerating suddenly whenever you reach a turn, and the swinging car is a bit wobbly. The layout is a few back to back turns and a couple of twists, so you well and truly can experience what the ride can do. For example see this pic of the first drop. Immediatley after coming off the first drop you feel like you slow down straight away in the inside seats because its almost like you are pivoting and turning on the spot. The outside on the other hand feels way faster.
So its still fun, an interesting gimmick and mechanically impressive, but doesn’t necessarily result in an enhanced ride experience. Temper your expectations
I got changed and headed into the water park. Yep you heard right, there’s an outdoor seasonal water park in a place with a harsh snowy winter, so it makes it even more laughable when people said Melbourne was too cold for water parks. The water was heated, but it still felt a teensy bit cool.
They had a nice cloakroom rather than lockers which was a godsend considering i had my luggage.
They had a couple of those old school concrete slides (Like Mountain Rapids at AW or Krakatoas at Blue Lagoon) Quite lengthy and interesting, with a few bumps and pools.
Big Drop is a trap door freefall slide, but was interesting in that it went through an underground tunnel. I like freefall slides so another winner.
The Snakepit is a group of 3 generic proslide bodyslides. Proslide put a fair bit of kick into these, and they are pretty darn intense, particularly the green enclosed one.
The Racer is a 4 lane racer, A bit of a hold up at the top when a little kid freaked out when confronted with the view from the top and the prospect of riding head first, and then the Dad tried to convince the kid to go. Sheesh if the kid doesn’t want to go, then don’t waste time upsetting them by trying to force it. Good air on the dips by employing professional riding methods.
There was a Tornado Wave called Cobra but skipped that one.
The other one I wanted to try was Waka Waka, a really long raft slide with 4 of those proslide flying Saucer Elements. They are totally a gimmick of course since all they do is provide a slightly nicer view out of the slide on the turns, but overall it’s still an objectively good slide due to the ballistic pacing and force you get on the back to back turns. And it’s looooong.
I was done with the water park so grabbed a bite at the water park cafe and headed back into the dry park.
The queues on Tranan had dropped off so I did a couple more goes on that to cement my opinions on it and make the most of what would likely be my only time to ever ride it.
They also had Snake. I love these high speed booster flat rides, but this one was spiced up with an additional arm that makes the circular rotation more irregular, so sometimes you do a big circle, and sometimes an extra tight one with some force. At only 8 per cycle the queue moved a bit slow, but I got some relief when they called for a single rider.
Had a stroll around and looked at the rest of the park.
The last coaster was Gruvbanan, a mack powered coaster. The coaster is about 3 helices and some turns.
One of the helices is in a big shed but it doesn’t really make it dark inside. The ride is built on a mound, with the queue cutting through in a trench underneath, so you walk through a long gold mine to reach the station, so points for them making that effort.
With time to kill till the next bus I did another lap on Spinner and a couple more on Tranan since it was down to a walk on at this point.
So overall, the park is pleasant enough, but I would only really bother if you are uber curious about Tranan. Otherwise, it’s nothing you wouldn’t have seen before.
Check out all the photos here:
https://www.parkz.com.au/search/photos/location/skara-sommarland
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It is indeed about diving hence the logo (Not really about a tall standing penguin)
It totally gives me the vibe that someone at the park got stuck on the idea of diving penguins and this is what we ended up with (2:15)
At the time I thought it was a kind of cute idea but at the same time a penguin is not quite badass enough for a thrill ride IMO.
QuoteIt's the exact same amount of effort that went into Sea Viper.
Pretty much lol. No station building, and gravel below the ride.
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Do they have magic bikes yet?
That's my first guess
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For the Dive Coaster I think it's meant to be like a deep diving penguin, and with Mako I believe it's the fastest shark in the world.
But SW overall seem to have really dialled back their theming (Manta at SWSD was perhaps the last)
Ice breaker for example I was hoping for more of a port theme with the train dodging icebergs.
Pipeline looks good, I've never understood the hate for standups.... just so long as you dont get a nutshot from the bouncing harness.
For the announcement trailer, why did they do really dramatic music and not fun Californian surf guitar?
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How's Trident looking in terms of progress though?
I get the impression that they will probably open that at the same time and just be done with the area.
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Stuff sorts itself out", ain't the best attitude with a theme park
Lol what a generalisation.
The maintenance of a ride is different to the operation of a single rider queue.
If the screens aren't working, then that needs deliberate attention by the staff.
If you get a few trains in a row where it's all even numbers, that's not the fault of the park.
It could very easily be a bunch of odds. I've been there when 3 or so singles went on the one train. That was good luck.
Re 4 across B&Ms, curious about the difference?
If you have a party of 3, then they'll want to sit in the same car, so it doesn't really matter if it's 2X2 or 4X1 seating right?
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One of those things were they should put a single rider or 2 on every 1-2 trains, simply to keep the queue moving. Otherwise, the queue will be end up getting too long.
But stuff sorts itself out. If the single rider queue gets too long, people should just leave it and join the main queue.
There's no real obligation to 'keep it moving' because everyone using it knows full well it's entirely down to the luck of single seats becoming available, and staff don't control that, nor should they.
Did you wait less time than the main queue?
If its 2 seats every train, you're making guests in the regular queue wait longer for no good reason since that's 9% of capacity now gone.
At other parks however the entry host sometimes just closes the SRQ if it gets too full.
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QuoteHypercoasterThe only thing I will bring to your attention is the single rider queue. Sometimes it can be a few trains before a single rider is needed. I’d suggest sending a train 2 single riders in one row, I’d just keeping that line moving.
Nooope that's not the point of a single rider queue.
The idea is that it CAN reduce your wait, but it's entirely luck of the draw, and it could even be as long a wait as the main queue.
If it was known that they grabbed 2 guests at a time, then pairs (or even singles) would just treat it as their personal VIP line.
It would annoy pairs waiting in the main queue if 2 people were grabbed from the singles queue to go in front of them.
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I'm guessing they worship it or it lives there.
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12 hours ago, Ashley said:
But getting the rights to RC would be extremely difficult.
Not literally a Toy story RC racer.
I mean a 16 seater car with forward facing seating. The actual theme of the chassis can be whatever would suit WBMWs intentions
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What if the vehicle was changed to be more like RC racer seen in the Toy Story areas at the various Disney parks?
Still, it has a 1.2m height limit if that were to happen.
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For what its worth, here's what I paid for Tokyo December 2019
$196 AUD roughly.
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38 minutes ago, rappa said:
To give an idea, I just bought a 2 day ticket to Disneyland and it cost me over $600 Australian.
No one in Australia is going to pay that much to visit a park and costs would be even higher with Australian wages.
*ok not no one, but not enough people to make the park viable
Jaysus!
I was wondering how you got it to add up to that, but yep, 2 day park hopper with genie plus (yep you pretty much have to suck that up since they took away free fastpass)
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Basically, in some places they just use blocks of foam with hard coat and paint, and after a while it can look like this:
(The yellow is the raw fibreglass)
But for decent outdoor rock its chickenwire and mesh, and done with actual concrete and grout.
This can last as long as anything else you'd make of concrete.
The sea world stuff looks like the latter.
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I mean, certainly judge a ride on the ride experience, but rating rides on how they behave during faults is just nitpicking imo.
99.9% of guests will probably never get a rollback.
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@Dean Barnettis the argument than in the event of a non launch the ride system is better if its rollback is higher?
But, Hydraulic launches can have varied rollbacks. It's not a case that all rollbacks on LSMs are low and all rollbacks on Hydraulic "almost make it over"
I've seen ones that go less than this even, as in a few meters up the curve.
Xcelerator
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What about Doomsday?
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The next park on my list in Scandinavia was Tusenfryd (Thousand Joys)
https://www.parkz.com.au/attraction/tusenfryd
Initially I wasn't going to Norway at all, but it turned out a couple of things I wanted to do on a planned day in Gothenburg were closed, so I got a cheap flixbus ticket and got on the bus at 5am for a day in Oslo.
The bus had me in Oslo by 9, that was enough time to grab a quick brekkie then backtrack to Tusenfryd.
A regular urban bus goes there, only took about half an hour and the bus was quite frequent, so no problems using public transport.
The park is stretched out along a hillside with rocks and boulders....very Nordic!
In fact the hill is so steep some escalators take you up to the park from the entry gates.
So my first ride was Speed Monster. Remember back in the mid 2000s when everyone was getting Intamin hydraulic launch coasters, including us?
Tusenfryd got one too.
It's the best thing here and I did several laps throughout my visit due to the good throughput.
The launch is powerful as you'd expect, straight into the pretzel like Norwegian loop, which has a good flick and twist at the top.
The pace continues as you make a big turn through some trees, before a good ejector hill.
The finale is good too, with a corkscrew and a couple of good twisted airtime hills that have some good laterals.
The next ride was HuriHuri, which opened this year. It's a zamperla spinning coaster and could best be thought of as a slightly more sophisticated version of those SBF spinners. Mild family thrills.
Throughput was terrible. The gates at the end of the platform were not automatic so the op had to go close them manually. It reminded me of the op having to attach the plastic chain on sea viper....x4!
You can see the queue that built up after I exited.
The other big draw of Tusenfryd, a Vekoma wooden coaster that has had both GCI reprofile it and now has Gravity group trains.
Looks good on paper, long drops down the hillside, big camelbacks, fast pace.
But it's absolute trash.
Gave it a go front and back, in the back you can literally see the cars full on bouncing up and down and shuffling like crazy. Bahhhhh
Continuing into the park I headed down the hill into the Viking themed zone, which had 3 big rides.
No real wait for SuperSplash.....a Mack super splash.
It wants to be a water coaster with its camel back, but it's more like a shoot the chutes. You ride in a huge 16 or 20 seater boat. Lift hill, small dip, gradual U turn, and then the main drop and floater hill Mack water coasters are known for, with a splashdown that gently spritzes you.
The other water ride is Ragnarok, a Hafema rapids ride (They built the rapids at Universal Singapore, and at Phantasialand)
It has a bit of Viking theming but it's all foam and not that well maintained so it's peeling
The rapids themselves are great, some good turbulent sections, a whirlpool where you pick up speed as the track goes around a spiral before a curved drop out the middle.
There's also a 2nd drop that's damn steep too
he 3rd ride in this area is Thor's Hammer, a 4d motion base dark ride by ETF.
It had a good vibe walking in because the whole thing is underground.
The motion is pretty gentle compared to the Six Flags JL rides, Spiderman, Transformers etc.
I couldn't really follow the story, imagine a few screens with Viking guys battling.
The media on the screens was top quality, like Hollywood standard, but I guess because the screens are so small (think smaller than JL at MW) you didn't quite get that sense of awe. That and the fact its not in 3D. The intermediate scenes were nice enough too, there was one nice bit with a troll forest. So in conclusion I think to work these motion base rides need to have huge sets to really envelope you.
Lunch was down in the Viking area too, they had a stand sponsored by the local dairy company, selling flavoured milk and toasties....Was like being at the royal show/ Ekka!
Moving on, they had Western Express, a Roadrunner clone but it was on a metal base frame.
Yep yep yep.I wandered up the back of the park and saw the foundations of the Gerstlauer suspended coaster.
I was too big to ride the world's smallest coaster, Dvergbanen.
Took one look at the upcharge haunted house and couldn't be arsed.
They had a couple of other flat rides such as a space shot and another zamperla giant discovery called spinspider, but wasn't in the mood for a nauseating flat.
I finally reached the last coaster, Loopen, an older Vekoma loopscrew, so called because it has both a loop and a corkscrew
It has a fairly compact layout, but the fan turn was so jarring on your back. A graceless ride I do not remember fondly at all.
Spinemelter 3000:
********************
As for the park, before my visit I was told it was Six Flags Norway and it is true in a way, it was a bit run down in places, a lot of bitumen pathways and chain link fences.
Have a look at SF Saint Louis in comparison and that's the vibe I got.
They are in the midst of giving the park a facelift, with two new themed zones, Route 66 and Expedition Lost Kingdoms.
In amongst all that they also have a bit of a Viking Zone, and a Wild West zone, and a bit of fairytale kids zone, but the wierd thing is they dont actually have names for these area, or promote them on the website like they do for the other two areas.
https://www.tusenfryd.no/en/oppdag-parken/planlegg-ditt-besok/temaomrader
It mostly seems to be new signage on some attractions, and some face lifted buildings, but I Think because all the in between spaces are all bitumen and chainlink the intended vibe of the zone doesn't carry through.
Eg in route 66, where are all the American road signs?
I finished up mid afternoon with some more rides on Speed Monster before taking the winding path downhill instead of the escalator for some interesting photos. (And the photos of this park can be viewed here https://www.parkz.com.au/search/photos/location/tusenfryd )
And then back on the bus to the Oslo city centre to spend the remainder of my day, eventually getting a coach back to Gothenburg at 11pm, just as the sun was setting)
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Thing is I've been to parks overseas on peak summer days and for me it still should be no more than an hour.... maybe 90 mins if its absolutely rammed, and even then a 90 min queue would only be one some rides, on a handful of days per year.
If a park is getting 2 hour queues outside , it needs more capacity or it needs to stay open much longer.
QuoteThe park gets exceptionally busy. We arrived at 7am, an hour prior to opening and the entry plaza was already full. It really is important to get in early so you can get a fastpass and a first ride with a shorter wait. Because of the crowds, the park has generous opening hours. You can pretty much ride most things in one day, but you have to keep in mind you'll probably only ride everything once, and you'll have a handful of 90+ waits peppered in.
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Further info here.
Will be located at Melbourne Central.
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Found this news via my normal source (A Simpsons Shitposting group) but it's not the first rodeo for the woman involved.
Last year she flipped a stolen car on the Ring Road under the influence of meth.
Terrible that it happened regardless.
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1 hour ago, New display name said:
White Christmas feels like it never changes so injecting some money into it would be good.
It's Groundhog Day themed.
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9 minutes ago, Ashley said:
I'm surprised they didn't follow the report up with,
"this comes almost 6 years after 4 people lost their lives at Dreamworld when the TRRR malfunctioned"
They always seem to mention that in an incident involving a ride, or theme park in general
The posts on Parkz of people "surprised it wasn't mentioned" are now more common than articles that actually reference the incident.
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They had upgraded the old screen ride with a new 4D dark ride which was pretty underwhelming but not bad for little old NZ
Curious about this one.
Old Theme Park Pics
in Theme Park Discussion
Posted · Edited by Gazza
But at the NRL you aren't sitting in a tunnel (It's open air),
And also on WWF I dont think there is 3m of spare space to the side of the lift hill to meet the " 1 meter vertical and 3 meters laterally" standard @Dean Barnett ?