How Busy Was Thorpe Park on Thursday, 3 September 2026?
Thorpe Park was quiet on Thursday, 3 September 2026. Across the day the average wait across all rides was 16 minutes, with the longest queue reaching 67 minutes for Hyperia around 11:00. The full hour-by-hour breakdown for every ride is below.
Average wait in minutes per ride per hour (UK time), recorded on the day from the park's live wait-time system.
- Longest wait of the day: Hyperia at 67 minutes (around 11:00).
- Average across all rides: 16 minutes.
- Quietest hour: 18:00 UK time.
| Ride | 09:00 | 10:00 | 11:00 | 12:00 | 13:00 | 14:00 | 15:00 | 16:00 | 17:00 | 18:00 | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyperia | – | 50 | 67 | 54 | 50 | 53 | 57 | 45 | 45 | 25 | 50 |
| Nemesis Inferno | – | – | 41 | 41 | 44 | 30 | 48 | 39 | 16 | 5 | 33 |
| SAW - The Ride | – | 24 | 47 | 34 | 29 | 41 | 37 | 31 | 17 | 5 | 29 |
| The Swarm | – | 24 | 47 | 27 | 26 | 37 | 25 | 18 | 16 | 10 | 26 |
| Samurai | – | 12 | 26 | 20 | 22 | 25 | 21 | 21 | 16 | 20 | 20 |
| The Walking Dead©: The Ride | – | 8 | 26 | 18 | 17 | 32 | 21 | 13 | 10 | – | 18 |
| Colossus | – | 17 | 35 | 33 | 20 | 18 | 14 | 13 | 8 | 5 | 18 |
| Stealth | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 40 | 39 | 30 | 18 | 10 | 10 | 18 |
| Rush | – | 8 | 27 | 15 | 16 | 25 | 14 | 18 | 15 | 20 | 18 |
| Ghost Train | – | – | – | 18 | 23 | 29 | 20 | 15 | 13 | 10 | 18 |
| Detonator | – | 5 | 23 | 15 | 12 | 22 | 11 | 17 | 9 | 5 | 13 |
| Depth Charge | 5 | 6 | 11 | 15 | 19 | 22 | 22 | 11 | 11 | 10 | 13 |
| Flying Fish | – | 6 | 13 | 8 | 9 | 13 | 11 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 9 |
| Quantum | – | 5 | 6 | 7 | 6 | 13 | 15 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 7 |
| Tidal Wave | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 12 | 6 | 9 | 10 | 5 | 7 |
| Mr Monkey's Banana Ride | – | 5 | 6 | 8 | 5 | 7 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| Big Easy Bumpers | – | 5 | 9 | 5 | 5 | 9 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 6 |
| Storm Surge | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Dobble Tea Party | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| High Striker | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Ready Player One 4D Experience | Age Rating 12A | – | – | – | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | – | 5 |
Cells show the average standby wait during that hour. Blue = 20 min or under, orange = 21–60 min, navy = over 60 min.
What happened on Thursday, 3 September 2026
Thursday 3 September was a quiet day at Thorpe Park. Across every ride we recorded, the average standby wait came out at 16 minutes, roughly 23% below the 21-minute average across every day we have recorded.
That makes it a quieter-than-usual Thursday — other Thursdays in the archive average 20 minutes. Against September as a whole, which averages 22 minutes, it was one of the lighter days of the month.
Queues followed the usual pattern: they built through the morning, peaked across the middle of the day (averaging 18 minutes between 12:00 and 15:00), then eased off through the afternoon. The quietest hour across the park was 18:00. The single longest queue we recorded was Hyperia at 67 minutes, around 11:00.
The rides holding the longest queues were Hyperia, Nemesis Inferno and SAW - The Ride — Hyperia averaged 50 minutes across the whole day and touched 67 at its worst. At the other end, nine rides averaged 10 minutes or less — Flying Fish, Quantum, Tidal Wave and Mr Monkey's Banana Ride were close to walk-on for most of the day. The spread between the busiest and quietest ride was 45 minutes, which is wide enough that where you chose to walk mattered more than when you arrived.
On a day at this level, the standard tactics are enough on their own. Arriving at opening and working through the headline coasters first would have cleared the biggest queues before they built, and there would have been no case for paying to skip anything. You can compare this with other dates in the full archive, work out which days of the year behave like this using the queue calendar, and read the underlying tactics in our guide to beating the queues.
Based on readings taken every 2 minutes across 9 hours of operation, from 10:00 to 18:00, covering 21 rides. Figures are the wait times posted by the park, averaged per hour; a dash in the table means the ride reported no wait for that hour, usually because it was closed.