ohara

Well I'm no expert but I'd say it is very smooth compared to something like Colossus. I rode the Swarm a couple of months after it opened and that was the same, as you'd expect from a brand new ride. I also forgot to mention it broke down on our last ride of the day! We arrived back at the station to a queue of trains - one in the station and another in behind that (and in front of us) waiting to load. About a minute went by and we could see the train in the station had all the restraints open but it wasn't being loaded. It very quickly became apparent there was a problem. Soon after, the remaining two trains arrived behind us and still nothing was happening. Then the announcements started saying they were having technical problems with the ride, and the engineers were called. They turned up pretty quickly and after a couple of minutes with apparently only a single screw driver and spanner, fixed the ride. It then re-opened a short while later. Photos:

I did a 2 day trip to Alton Towers the weekend before last. I went on Sunday (big mistake) and Monday. Sunday was packed out - we only managed to do 4 rides in the whole day. Thankfully Monday was a magnitude quieter, and we arrived dead on 9am to make use of our early ride access (we got there a little later on Sunday). I managed to ride the Smiler 5 times over the 2 days and it is a fantastic ride. My first time on was on the front right hand seat. It's a great ride and they did well to pack so much track and so many inversions into a small space. I love the vertical lift hill in the middle of the ride too. As you'd expect it's very smooth for a brand new ride but there is one element of the track near the very end which gives you quite a violent jolt (we nicknaked it the "whiplash inversion"). As long as you are braced for it, it's not so bad. The queue times were horrendous as expected on Sunday and we went straight for the Smiler when we arrived and had to wait about 90 minutes to get our first ride. On Monday we rode it 4 times without queueing more than 20 minutes each time and at one point we were just walking in the single rider entrance as nobody else was in it! I'm disappointed they got rid of Burger King too.