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Lightwater Valley - Future?

Mushroom said:
Sadly VM died around 2014 ish. It was a big shame. I kinda wished I went to LWV before i left Yorkshire in 2016. But I saw this image I took of t'Ultimate pop up in my Facebook memories from 12 years ago...
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How did you get access there? I always thought it was a shame that so few off-ride pictures and videos exist, especially of the woodland part of the ride, do you have more like this?

PS great move for the park to get accommodation, doesn't really interest me (the park is basically dead to me now) but I expect it will be a good investment.
 
Peet said:
How did you get access there? I always thought it was a shame that so few off-ride pictures and videos exist, especially of the woodland part of the ride, do you have more like this?

PS great move for the park to get accommodation, doesn't really interest me (the park is basically dead to me now) but I expect it will be a good investment.
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I saw this Facebook page posted loads of photos and videos around the ride after it closed:

www.facebook.com

Sneakycoasters

Sneakycoasters. 389 likes · 36 talking about this. :)
www.facebook.com www.facebook.com
 
Rocket looks... awful with a strange alternating colour scheme which is most likely intentional as the new darker purple was seen before the ride was built up.

Some lore from multiple comments: Rocket had severe issues when it was Airbender, where only one car was ever allowed to run on the track at a time, was rough, had painful brakes, and Camel Creek's removal for the ride was "beyond economical repair". The ride was originally scheduled to open on April 7, this Saturday, but has been delayed until further notice.

In other news, Ultimate's corpse is in full view with a hall of mirrors occupying the space beneath the station...

Credit to Theme Park Insanity for the photos, who commented that the park felt oddly quiet for the Easter holidays.
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In the headlines: "The Ultimate finally received its big replacement!"

With all seriousness: what has been the reason for these changes in the park? The park has a new owner, right?
 
I have to say that I’m not a fan of that colour scheme on Rocket at all. My first thought upon seeing that photo was that they hadn’t finished repainting it yet…

I hope that Lightwater Valley has a nice future ahead of it in its new guise as an under-10s park, but I can’t deny that its appeal to me, as someone who lives over 4 hours away, has lessened significantly since they removed the likes of The Ultimate and Raptor Attack. However, I guess that doesn’t really matter, as I’m evidently not the target audience.
 
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Matt N said:
I have to say that I’m not a fan of that colour scheme on Rocket at all. My first thought upon seeing that photo was that they hadn’t finished repainting it yet…

I hope that Lightwater Valley has a nice future ahead of it in its new guise as an under-10s park, but I can’t deny that its appeal to me, as someone who lives over 4 hours away, has lessened significantly since they removed the likes of The Ultimate and Raptor Attack. However, I guess that doesn’t really matter, as I’m evidently not the target audience.
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Tbh The Rocket looks like it’s seen better days. Rumour has it it’s supposed to be really unreliable only being able to run 1 train. I can’t see it lasting long at the park tbh
 
We spent the day there on Easter monday, my lad is 6 and he was a touch bored at times.

Whole entrance area/safari area looks very clean and impressive. And the new keep ride was great with all the fake animals but an impressive design.

Pirate area is still a nice area but every other part of the park is an absolute mess. Whole area where the ultimate was along to raptor attack looks like a ghost town or an area out of the walking dead.

Overall was a good day but far too big of an area for the park now as majority of rides take up a small area space
 
liam147a said:
We spent the day there on Easter monday, my lad is 6 and he was a touch bored at times.

Whole entrance area/safari area looks very clean and impressive. And the new keep ride was great with all the fake animals but an impressive design.

Pirate area is still a nice area but every other part of the park is an absolute mess. Whole area where the ultimate was along to raptor attack looks like a ghost town or an area out of the walking dead.

Overall was a good day but far too big of an area for the park now as majority of rides take up a small area space
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Agreed. The back of the park needs sorting out as it’s an absolute mess.
 
I have such a soft spot for the park, but haven't visited in best part of a decade. The reality is the huge debt in building and late opening of the ultimate hugely damaged the park, and it never really kicked on.

The rides brought in were truthfully fairground fillers at best, and it was on a road to nowhere from then, not helped by most things needing generators to run due to the lack of infrastructure.

I suppose a holiday village might revive the park a little, but the truth is the best hope they had was that a group like Loopings or at the time Tussaud's group bought them and invested in building it to the next level like Paultons have.

Sadly it's little more than a tatty seaside town in the woods now, put to shame by minnows like Ocean Beach in South Shields.

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slappy mcguire said:
I have such a soft spot for the park, but haven't visited in best part of a decade. The reality is the huge debt in building and late opening of the ultimate hugely damaged the park, and it never really kicked on.

The rides brought in were truthfully fairground fillers at best, and it was on a road to nowhere from then, not helped by most things needing generators to run due to the lack of infrastructure.

I suppose a holiday village might revive the park a little, but the truth is the best hope they had was that a group like Loopings or at the time Tussaud's group bought them and invested in building it to the next level like Paultons have.

Sadly it's little more than a tatty seaside town in the woods now, put to shame by minnows like Ocean Beach in South Shields.

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Yeah I get the feeling you're right on that - although I think The Ultimate did a lot of good for the park, but probably not enough to counteract the cost of it!
I think The Ultimate was initially a fairly cheap project that then escalated into a bit of a nightmare for them to get fully finished and working - I wonder if they'd made it a shorter ride, could it have still had a positive impact whilst saving them a lot of money?

It needed a ton of investment in the early 2000's that never came, leaving it to stagnate.

I still look back on my visits in the 90's and early 2000s with my family with so much fondness, it was a really nice place to go on a family day out. With The Ultimate, the big swing ride at the entrance, The Rat Ride, The Toad Hole, The Bat Flyer, all had so much character.

One memory is riding The Ultimate once and seeing (and hearing) one of the wheels literally fall off as we were on the second half, and I saw it fly off into the undergrowth! Reported it to staff and they shut it down for a few hours.
 
The ultimate was never a ride it was an experience. It simply couldn't have been built and passed by the H&S executive these days. In the noughties the only way you could ride it unbruised was to cross your legs, which is just ridiculous.

First part of the ride was horrendously designed with the first lift hill meaning that if you were in the front you were already hanging half way down the down bit while the back of the trains caught up. Then the ridiculous bunny hops and sloooooooow second lift.

The ride we remember was the valley run which was brutal - it was never lost on me that its very name was an anagram of Mutilate, because that seemed it's only purpose.

It was though, like nothing else, warts and all. It's what the cross valley coaster at AT maybe would have been like, or what 13 aspired to be. Tearing it down was an act of absolute cultural vandalism, but while it did huge damages to the finances of a little park, what ultimately killed Lightwater Valley was underinvestment and questionable running of the park after the Staveley family sold it on.

Worst thing is, while it clearly needed investment, I don't think it would have necessarily cost a horrendous amount to get it in a position it could have taken advantage of the profile of the ultimate. That time is long since past and it will either end up as a pseudo farm park again (rides like the ladybird are showing their age, and christ only knows what that new pink erection is meant to do), or go out of business.

And for a park so naturally pretty and well served by decent transport links, without many natural competitors is an absolute abhorrence.

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