About This Site

Who we are, how the queue data is actually collected, what it can and cannot tell you, and how we source and correct everything else on the site.

ThorpeParkQueue.com is an independent website that records how long the queues are at Thorpe Park Resort — every ride, every two minutes, every day the park is open — and keeps the history so you can see the patterns rather than just the current number.

We are not affiliated with Thorpe Park Resort or Merlin Entertainments Ltd, we do not sell tickets, and we receive nothing from the park. This page explains exactly how the site works, because a queue-times site is only useful if you can judge how much to trust its numbers.

Who runs this

This is a small independent project, built and maintained by one person: a software developer and Thorpe Park regular who got tired of standing in a 90-minute queue for Stealth having just walked past a 10-minute Nemesis Inferno. The site started as a personal tool for deciding which ride to walk to next, and grew into a public record of the park's queue behaviour because that record turned out not to exist anywhere else.

There is no editorial team and no commercial relationship with any theme park. That has an obvious downside — we have no press access and no inside information — and one significant upside: nothing on this site is written to sell you a ticket, an upgrade or a Fastrack package. When we think Fastrack is a waste of money, or that your family would have a better day at Chessington, we say so.

How the queue data is collected

The methodology is deliberately simple, which is what makes it reliable:

1. Every two minutes, an automated job requests the current wait time for every tracked ride at Thorpe Park.
2. Those figures come from ThemeParks.wiki, an open theme-park data project that reads Thorpe Park's own live wait-time system — the same source that feeds the official Thorpe Park app.
3. Each reading is timestamped and written to our own database, where it stays. Nothing is discarded or smoothed at the point of collection.
4. The homepage, the per-ride charts, the hourly heatmap and the daily archive are all generated from that stored history.

Collection pauses automatically when the park is closed and resumes when rides reopen. Times shown on the site are UK local time. Because we store every reading rather than a daily summary, we can answer questions the park's own app cannot — what Hyperia's queue actually did between 2pm and 4pm on a specific Tuesday in June, for example, or which hour of the day is genuinely quietest across the last month.

What our numbers mean — and what they don't

We would rather tell you the limitations than have you over-trust the charts. Four things worth understanding:

• These are posted wait times, not measured ones. We record the figure Thorpe Park displays, which is the park's own estimate. Real waits are sometimes shorter and occasionally longer. What the number is reliably good at is comparison: a posted 60 is genuinely busier than a posted 20, and that is what you need in order to decide where to walk.
• A short queue is not always a fast queue. Ride throughput varies enormously. SAW – The Ride loads slowly, so its queue crawls; Stealth's roughly 30-second cycle chews through a line far quicker than its posted number suggests. Our individual ride pages describe how each queue actually behaves.
• Averages hide breakdowns. When a ride goes down and reopens, the queue spikes. Our hourly averages include those spikes, which is realistic but means a single bad day can pull a monthly average upwards.
• We depend on an upstream source. If ThemeParks.wiki or the park's own system has an outage, we record a gap. We show gaps as gaps rather than interpolating across them, because inventing data to make a chart look tidy would defeat the point of the site.

Where our ride and guide information comes from

Queue numbers are automated. Everything written — the ride pages, the visitor guide, the height restrictions and the strategy guides — is written by hand, and we hold it to a standard we can defend:

• Ride specifications (heights, speeds, drop heights, inversion counts, restraint types, opening years) are checked against Thorpe Park's own website and support pages first, then cross-referenced against established references such as Wikipedia and the Roller Coaster Database.
• Operational details (height minimums, age limits, Fastrack tiers and prices, weather thresholds) come from Thorpe Park's official pages, because these change and the park is the only authority on them.
• Queue behaviour and strategy advice — when to arrive, which queues move fastest, which months are quietest — comes from our own recorded data, which is the part of this site nobody else has.
• Where a claim cannot be verified, we either leave it out or word it so the uncertainty is visible. We would rather say “among the park's longest-standing rides” than invent a date.
• Prices and dates are labelled with the season they apply to and linked back to the official source, because they will go out of date and you should be able to check.

Every page that carries factual claims about rides is re-checked against those sources when we substantially revise it. In July 2026 we completed a full audit of all 21 ride pages against official and reference sources, which corrected several details — including the ride type and area for Quantum, the seat count on Detonator, the inversion sequence on Colossus and the drop height on Tidal Wave.

Corrections

We get things wrong sometimes, and we would rather hear about it than not. If you spot an error — a height limit that has changed, a ride description that does not match reality, a queue reading that looks impossible — please tell us. We check reports against the official source and fix confirmed errors directly on the page rather than quietly leaving them.

Substantive corrections to ride facts are noted in the relevant page's content rather than hidden, and material changes to how the site works are described here on this page.

How the site is paid for

Running the collection infrastructure costs money, and the site carries advertising through Google AdSense to cover it. We think you should know three things about that:

• Advertising is the only revenue. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored ride reviews, no paid placements, and no commission on tickets or Fastrack.
• No advertiser has any influence over what we write. Our Fastrack guide concluding that most visitors should not buy Fastrack is a reasonable test of that.
• If you decline cookies in our banner, we set a non-personalised-ads flag before advertising loads, so you get contextual ads only. Full detail is in our privacy policy.

What we collect about you

Almost nothing. There are no accounts, no logins and no newsletter. We set no first-party cookies of our own; your cookie banner choice is stored in your browser's local storage and never leaves your device. We use Google Analytics for aggregate visitor counts and Google AdSense for advertising, both of which are described in full, along with your UK GDPR rights, in the privacy policy.

What you can do here

• Live queue times — the current wait for every ride, refreshed every two minutes.
• Best time to visit — an hour-by-hour heatmap built from the last 28 days of collected data.
• Daily archive — a permanent record of how every day played out, added automatically each night.
• Queue calendar — month-by-month and day-of-week patterns for choosing a date.
• Ride guides — every ride with its stats, restrictions and how its queue really behaves.
• Strategy guides — how to beat the queues, whether Fastrack is worth it, visiting with children or in the rain, and what to expect at Fright Nights.

Contact

Corrections, questions and suggestions are all welcome, and reports of factual errors are prioritised. Use the contact details on this page to reach us; we read everything, though we cannot always reply individually.

← Back to live queue times  |  Visitor Guide  |  FAQ  |  Privacy Policy