coasterbill

Thunderbolt is butter smooth and it's great. It's always been butter smooth and it's always been great. It's not great in a way that it's going to end up on any top 10 lists but it's always been a really solid coaster. They're not going to ever touch this ride nor should they. Don't be ridiculous. Every time I ride Thunderbolt I can't help but feel like Six Flags New England doesn't deserve this ride. To be fair though (nobody freak out but I'm about to give Six Flags New England some credit for something) for whatever reason Six Flags has always done a great job maintaining this coaster. Every time I've visited the park over the last 15 years or so (which has been quite often) the ride has always delivered a smooth, fun ride every single time.

I was down in the Charlotte area for Christmas and the temps were pushing 70 every day. I know this is warmer than average but I've been at Great Adventure when it was in the 30's and every coaster had a 3 hour wait and I've been to Dollywood when coasters had hour plus waits at Christmas when they cut the lines off for low temps. Combine the moderate temperatures with the fact that it seems like 99.9% of people in that area celebrate Christmas and you have yourself a great opportunity. It boggles the mind that this park doesn't put on a Christmas event. I'm convinced that it would be an absolute home run. I know it's not easy to put on a Dollywood level event but they don't have to. Put a ton of lights up, have a few decent Christmas shows (we're not talking Dollywood here), have Santa there and you have yourself a goldmine. This is obviously just my uneducated opinion as I know nothing about Theme Park financials but it seems to be working for SFOG which isn't too far away and it's an amazing success for Dollywood. I would think Carowinds could pull it off.

In regards to the capacity discussion, I completely understand the reasons behind this is and that ridership does not always equal popularity but I love watching Sky Ride beat Top Thrill Dragster and Maverick every year. I just wanted to throw that out there.

...well it's officially the middle of February which means the offseason is starting to take it's toll on everyone's sanity.

I read it... and I still stand by what I said. I think if he makes that change within his 10 year plan then the park will be much better than it is now (and that's not to say I don't like it now because I do... that's why I'm being so nit picky).

From Cedar Point's Twitter... the rising floor pieces are in place.

Sure! The first is Pacificoaster's Starpointe Link And the other is Airtime's Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril Link And for anyone that can't download them click on the images for a full scale aerial.

So RCT4 is going to be like RCT3 only way worse? I don't get it. What's the potential upside to this game? As you know I can't stand RCT3. I feel like RCT2 is much better and much more realistic but obviously a game with 4 isometric views would be a tough sell in an age where everyone wants everything to be 3D so I expected them to stick with 3D but make the track transitions less choppy and add a little more realism. That's all they had to do but somehow they managed to take what I consider a crappy game (RCT3) and come up with a game that's so bad that it makes RCT3 look amazing by comparison. They're removing options and coming up with stupid, unrealistic rides and themes. What's the point? I'm really just confused at this point. How did we "progress" from this... to this... And it took them like 15 years to do it? I mean... can Atari really look at both Arrow Loopers I just posted and not see that this game sucks?

I really want to see you break away from the strict grid path layout. I think doing so will help your park-making immensely.

I'm expecting this ride to be a real sleeper hit. Knoebels always seems to get it right (even if it takes them 7 years to do it in some cases) and the cool layout and lap-bar-only trains should make for a great ride.

Yes, that's going to be the new Lakside Paviliion. Here is some more information on that.

That's not really the main point of my post but haven't they been saying that for about 10 years now? lol

First and foremost, welcome to the site! Your post was really well thought out and while I don't necessarily agree with everything you said I hope you stick around and I do enjoy this debate. Here are my thoughts... I'm glad you believe them but unfortunately I don't because I can only go on what I've seen over the last decade or so and despite the new ownership all I see is more of the same. I hope you don't mind me quoting an older post of mine but this is what we've seen. Every park removes rides but this park does it at an amazing rate and I can confidently say that this park was worse in 2014 than it was in 2005. Other parks remove ride but manage to grow over time and usually improve. Wicked Cyclone may very well change things as it looks to be an amazing ride so that statement may no longer be true, but it has been for years and this practice of constantly removing and not replacing rides is still a very unfortunate one and it's more pronounced here than at many other parks. That's what I've seen from this park and they show no sign of changing their ways. I should have mentioned Houdini, I just forget about it since Great Adventure takes so much better care of theirs and has a lot more working effects so we don't bother with the SFNE version. The others don't really stick out to me... Sky Screamer would if it weren't a capacity nightmare but we never ride it for that reason. I should have also mentioned Pandemonium as a good coaster. It totally slipped my mind but one more stand-out flat still doesn't change my opinion. Now we're up to three and one that's not worth riding due to it's insane wait times. This is basically a chain wide problem but it's a shame to see it at a park that used to have so much charm. This isn't really about the Sky Ride, it's just another example of a bigger problem but actually doppelmayr and many others still service and make parts for Von Roll chairlifts and Sky Rides. I believe 17 of them still operate and some have even been recently relocated. I never claimed to be 100% sure of the reason for it's removal but the prevailing rumor is that it needed a new cable. Generally they need them every 10 years or so so given it's 2004-2005 offseason replacement it's likely due for one but that's all speculation. In any case this screams of cost cutting just like most of their other decisions, and I still think that removing a popular transportation ride that's designed to bring guests directly to the location of your 2 biggest and most popular new additions is a dumb idea. Like I said though the Skyway is just another example of this larger problem. I'd be more likely to agree with you if this were an isolated thing but they remove rides all the time and almost never replace them. Until Cyclone's closing weekend I'd never seen that ride running more than one train and that's averaging 3-5 trips every year since the year 2000. Bizarro usually runs 2 trains but it runs 1 quite a bit. To their credit Mind Eraser (lol who cares?) and Batman always run 2 but Thunderbolt (for some reason), Goliath (obviously) and Flashback (obviously) can only run 1 so capacity has never been a strong point at Six Flags New England. I can excuse it for rides like the ones I mentioned (though Bizarro does usually have painfully slow crews) but rides like the Skyway and the Sky Screamer always have/had abysmal operations. Then again if you want a lesson in terrible ops at SFNE I invite you to try to ride anything at the water park. That's a different story though. My major complaint isn't about the staff (they are awful though) it's about ride removals. When I rode it the ride didn't even do 1 full rotation at the top so I don't agree with the "decently long ride time" and this crew is terrible. The ride does have a low capacity but they make it a lot worse. I can't agree with you on this... they have a million ride ops on this ride and operations are still awful. I actually hope they do re-use it. I just hope they don't act like they removed the ride because they had to use it as a queue because that's ridiculous and it's been suggested by a lot of people. There were a million better solutions. I don't know if they're going to reuse it or not but the last thing this park needs is 2 more abandoned ride areas (one for each station). I'm assuming the other station will just have 2 garbage cans placed at the bottom of the steps and they'll call it a day but if they don't re-use the other side it has the potential to be even more of an eyesore than the South end station. Not at all! This is a great debate. Welcome to TPR! Cedar Point continues to grow and evolve every year. Most parks do and you're right... sometimes awesome new things come at the expense of older things... and sometimes those older things were pretty good. For example Cedar Point removed the Swan Boats and the Log Flume for Maverick... an amazing coaster. It should be noted that those 2 rides were actually in the way of Maverick unlike the New England Skyway which is not in the way of anything. Anyway a few years later they built a new flume ride... and then added a great family ride with Windseeker the following year... followed by an awesome new coaster (which came at the expense of 2 rides) but then they added 2 new family rides the following year. That's how normal parks do things. As you said... attractions sometimes come at the expense of older ones. If that's what was happening at Six Flags New England that would be fine, but it's not. They remove things all the times and almost never replace them. They just leave empty pads everywhere (see the post I quoted above). I know a lot of Six Flags parks do this but it's getting ridiculous at Six Flags New England. I'm thrilled that we're getting Wicked Cyclone but I really wish this park would stop removing everything that's not a coaster and leaving empty pads everywhere.

That's a very nice little touch. I like what they've done with the Banshee station and now the Fury325 station. While neither will be highly themed, they have started to introduce some nice touches that make them slightly unique and that's a step in the right direction.

Dragster and Maverick suffer greatly from low capacity. Dragster is also not open for early entry so most of these other coasters are open for an average of 1 extra hour every day which adds up over the course of the season I'm sure. Also... Dragster was closed for an entire week around Coastermania and breaks down all the time like you mentioned. It also goes down for wind and rain a lot (though Raptor and Gatekeeper do too). The only other things that jump out on the list are that the Sky Ride is the 7th most popular ride in the park despite closing for pretty much all of Halloweekends due to wind so good for them, and Power Tower's numbers took a (ahem) huge drop between last year and this year. We probably ride those 2 rides more than any other rides in the park... Sky Ride because it's a nice ride and it's functional and Power Tower because it never has a line so whenever we pass it, we ride it.

Of course Millennium Force has the most rides. Gatekeeper has the most riders.

If you get a Platinum or Gold Flash Pass you'll be fine. Last year Sky Screamer was only available on Platinum and attempting to ride this ride without a Flash Pass is pure torture (it's the slowest moving line ever). If that's still the case and you want to ride it then get Platinum, if it's not the case and they let more people ride it then that's great if you have a Flash Pass but will somehow make the stand-by line even worse (which is hard to imagine). Operations in this park are slow, but it's manageable on most rides (Sky Screamer and Goliath though...lol). Many rides have awful policies though that add an extra touch of annoying to your day (you can't pick your seat on Thunderbolt, Batman, Goliath and probably Wicked Cyclone... you can't even pick your tower on Scream even when they're all running in different modes and despite the sign about the front seat rider line on Batman the employees don't really like that policy so they just ignore it). Operations are bad... but I've seen worse (Great Escape). The attitude of the employees is a much bigger problem than the speed of the employees in most cases.

Please tell me this isn't true! It's absolutely true... they routinely run 4 cars on the entire ride which means they usually have one on the cable at a time each going in opposite directions. Over the last few years they pretty much never ran more than 5. I'm not joking. They have one ride op on each side... and a lot of times they're still too slow so the car will disengage the cable by itself without anyone catching it, then actually slowly start to roll back towards the cable before they run over and grab it. And this Skyway could only hold 2 per car... not 4 like most Von Rolls. Again... I'm just going to leave this here.

Those are always fun to look at... Here are the 2013 numbers for the nerds like me that want to compare.

I've already explained my "hate" for this park, as have many others. I am excited for Wicked Cyclone, I just wish there was anything good about this park besides their 4 star coasters (Wicked Cyclone, Bizarro, Thunderbolt and Batman... I would have said 5 but Goliath is awful now) and their 2 good flats (Buzzsaw and Tomohawk... I'm not including NESS because operations are so amazingly horrible that we never ride it). 10 Years ago SFNE was beautiful and it had a ton of personality and charm. There were nice shaded areas, a great selection of flats and even some good theming (for Six Flags). Now that's pretty much all gone. Sure they'll probably re-use the Skyway station for a Wicked Cyclone queue but only because they're cheap... they could have easily but the queue elsewhere, they just chose not to because they love getting rid of family rides and continuing to cut costs in every possible way. Also, assuming you're including Skyway as a ride with declining ridership that would probably tend to happen when you run a grand total of 4 cars on a Skyway. lol

The removal of Skyway is just Six Flags New England being Six Flags New England. It sounds like it was due for a new cable and they didn't feel like buying one. Based on the way this park has operated for the last 10 years there's no reason to think this ride will ever be replaced with anything.

How would that transfer track work? Otherwise very nice.

Based just on that screen I have no interest... I'll be playing RCT2 if anyone needs me.

Cedar Point is just so good at online and social media marketing... I mean so good. I love the idea of letting everyone vote. Great job Cedar Point!

Fastlane Plus may be worth it just for Maverick re-rides. Ride it once in the morning and once you get off it feeds you into a gift shop where you can buy Fastlane. Since you're already splurging for the Hotel room a few extra bucks for Fastlane Plus may be worth it just because Maverick is so awesome but you don't have to make that decision yet. It helps you a lot with Dragster and Gatekeeper too (especially early in the day) but I'm assuming Dragster might be a one-and-done since you can ride Kingda Ka close to home and it's essentially the same ride.