Behind the Scenes Tour, Alton Towers
Last month, I posted about a behind the scenes tour at Alton Towers which Andy and I had booked tickets to attend. That tour took place yesterday and what a fantastic day it was. We saw many things on the day, but here are some of the highlights.
The group were shown the vault of Hex whilst the ride was in motion and boy does it spin fast. We took a look in the control room of Rita and were taken inside the hydraulics shed to see all the equipment speed into action each time a train was launched. We took a look around the oblivion maintenance shed, saw the old Coaster Corner area of the park and were given the rare opportunity to climb to the roof of the flag tower for some astounding views of the park and surrounding areas. Later in the day we were able to see lots of materials from the Alton Towers archive, take a walk around Duel with the lights on and climb up the lift hill of Air for more brilliant views of the valley. As a bonus, we were also allowed to take a peak into the tent containing the old Black Hole rollercoaster, which is in the process of being dismantled and sent to a new park. Very little of the track work remains now, although the spiral is still in place. With the track gone, we were able to see how large the tent actually is, and it is indeed huge. A nice large attraction could surely fit in the space, perhaps in years to come.
Another great part of the day was meeing such a friendly group of people on the tour, some of whom are also members of towers related websites such as Towers Almanac and Towers Times. Additionaly, it was also good fun to be able to jump on many of the parks rides without needing to queue thanks to the excellent priority passes included in the ticket price. Those passes allowed us to ride all the rides we wanted to in a short space of time on a peak day! Fantastic!
Unfortunately, we forgot to take any photo camera’s on the day, so I grabbed a few shots on my phone. Subsequently the quality isn’t brilliant. However, we did get plenty of video footage which will probably be viewable soon. Plenty of other people from the tour also managed to get lots of photo’s which will also be on the web soon. I’ll post some links when they’re up. In the meantime, here are a handful of pics taken from my phone…
