l would like to thank a freind of mine Gordon Clinton-Lindop for allowing me to use these photographs of American adventure.

They were taken during the 1990 season and I know from comments to the site and emails its a park allot of people have missed.

I only got to visit the park once during its operation and that was the year before it closed.

The Vekoma boomerang coaster featured on the left  hand side was once classed as Britains best coaster after it opened in 1989.

For anyone that have never been to American Adventure theme park, it was built on the site of an old open cast coal mine and centered around a huge lake in the middle of the park. Some people believe the demise of the park came in 2005 when they re-themed the park as a family park and got rid of the white knuckle rides  including the Vekoma Boomerang coaster they named “the missile’.

The Golden Ticket Awards are presented to the “Best of the Best” in
the amusement industry calculated from an international poll conducted
by Amusement Today. Surveys were sent to a database of experienced and
well-traveled amusement park fans around the world  in balanced geographical regions asking them to rate the “bests” in 25categories such as “amusement parks,” “roller coasters,” “shows,” “friendliest staff” and “water rides.” The 2008 winners are …

I visited Disneyland Paris in July 2008, we spent a total of 4 days on the 2 parks and 3 nights in the Santa fe hotel. One of the many highlights for me of a trip to somewhere like Disney is the dark rides. With attractions like It’s a small world and Pirates topping the list. This first set of photographs covers most of the small world ride, however some photographs and sets are missing due to the fact the ride is very dark in places and ISO 1600 on my camera is the best I have for low light.

I was very fortunate to attend a behind the scenes tour of Southport Pleasureland the weekend before the park closed its gates for the final time.

I was in a group of about 50 members of Club Pleasure Beach and we got to ride Traumatizer (now relocated to Blackpool as Infusion) and the Cyclone wooden roller coaster (which was later demolished).

Also included in the tour was a Q&A session with one of the parks directors and a look into the workshops located behind the cyclone and finally a tour of the ghost train with the lights on.

These are the pictures taken at this event.

I was fortunate to visit Disney in Florida back in February this year, and although i took a ton (literally) of photographs ive been stuck for time to post them.

Heres a selection taken of the dreams come true parade which was on mid afternoon in Magic Kingdom. For any Disney purists out there this isnt meant to be the full parade just a small selection of the photographs I had taken.

Requested by a few readers over the last 6 months, Top Thrill Dragster photographs taken during my trip in 2007, its almost a year now since I took the 23hr door to hotel room trip to Cedar Point. Amazing how time flies as you get older.

Top Thrill Dragster was introduced to Cedar Point in 2003. It was made by Intamin and has a height of 420ft, at one point it was the highest coaster in the world, only to be overtaken in 2005 by Kingda Ka at Six flags great adventure, New Jersey at 456ft.

The ride has a top speed of 120mph which is reached in a breathtaking 4 seconds.

For those that requested here’s some of my pictures taken during this trip. I hope you like them.

For anyone that’s a fan of dark rides especially the Haunted House or as its now known Duel at Alton towers there is only one real source for information about this ride and thats the haunted one website which has been updated recently.

There’s obviously alot of fans out there as we got together some time ago and wrote an article based on a behind the scenes tour and some history which was provided by the haunted one, this article is one of the most popular on this website with consistently over 1,500 views a month.

If you havent seen the site lately, check it out. http://www.hauntedone.co.uk/

Good luck with the new site Mik, im sure it will be a great success.

Further to the news yesterday about the gallery going off-line we have installed a version of Coppermine today and started uploading all the photographs, we should have done close to 1,000 by the end of the day.

Im hoping to get the remaining few thousand updated by the end of the week with some additional photographs from the recent florida trip and a few other parks taking the total to just over 10,000 possibly more with the closed parks (southport, Rhyl ocean beach and American adventure).

If anyone has any photographs they would like to submit please get in touch. In the meantime the new gallery is in place of the old one at http://www.ridemad.com/photo

Thanks for reading.
Paul

One of the most popular attractions at Universal Studios in Florida is Jaws the ride, considering its age its still drawing huge crowds. 
Offically opened in 1990 the attraction suffered some serious mechanical problems which took almost 3 years to iron out. 

The ride was redesigned during this time and following a soft opening in September 1993 it offically reopened in 1994. The ride was opened by two of the films stars Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and Brody’s wife (Lorraine Gray)

Out of all the rides and attraction at Universal Studios Jaws is one of those rides I had most looked forward to visiting. Im a huge fan of the Jaws films especially the first one and can still recall with anorak accuracy some of the most famous lines from the film. 

If there’s one thing that annoys enthusiasts more than wasps at theme parks it’s queue jumpers, the people that can’t read the huge “NO QUEUE JUMPING” signs and the ones at the back of the queue when god handed out brains. These people young and old seem to have no morals or respect for other people.

Even worse are the parks that plainly refuse to do anything about this annoying, rude and disrespectful practice that happens so commonly, even though its spelt out on the signage queue jumping will not be tolerated.