Here’s a spring update from Disneyland Paris brought to us by Alain Littaye of the Disney and more blog. Alain tells the story of how the Big Thunder Mountain trains almost lost their locomotives during the recent refurbishment and shows us so lovely photos of the park. ~~Rick
Here’s an up-to-date look at the Magic Kingdom at Disneyland Paris. Our thanks to Max Fan, D&M contributor and Dlrp Welcome webmaster for the photos.
As we can see in these photos, although the day was a bit cloudy, spring flowers have finally arrived at DLP!
Let’s go down Main Street towards Discoveryland…
…where the rocks at the entrance are in need of some tender loving care.
For now, they are just hidden by a wall of plants.
These three locations at the back of Discoveryland won’t look the same in two or three years when the expected Star Wars Land is built…once the park finds money, of course!
The Captain EO Theater will eventually be transformed…to a Jedi Academy, perhaps?
Pizza Planet will eventually disappear and the famous Star Wars Cantina restaurant will likely take its place.
Moving on to Fantasyland, after several months with both Casey Jr. trains missing their last wagon, only one train is now caboose-less.
Before:
After:
In Adventureland, Colonel Hathi’s Pizza Outpost is currently closed for refurbishment.
Right in front of it, though, work is almost finished on the “cool post” and ATM location.
In Frontierland, Big Thunder Mountain was scheduled to reopen on June 14th with the new disabled guest entrance. That is the good news. However, there might be some bad news: a very strong rumor has been circulating that the locomotives currently at the front of each train will be removed and replaced with a single wagon. This would be similar to the Hong Kong Disneyland Grizzly Mountain, where the trains don’t have front locomotives. As it turns out, the rumor was true at some point. They actually considered doing this, but the idea was nixed and the trains will keep their locomotives!
Why would they even consider inflicting this sacrilegious change on the Big Thunder Mountain theme? The first thing that comes to mind is that having a new wagon would add six more people to each train and increase the ride capacity. But, DLP was not considering this move to increase rider capacity. Instead, they wanted to keep overall capacity of the attraction the same, but achieve it with fewer trains running. There were so many breakdowns caused by slow loading and unloading that they wanted to increase the distance between trains. In this case, there would be a maximum of four trains on the track instead of five. Right now they are studying other ways to increase each train’s capacity while retaining the engine at the front. We’ll see if they can figure out a way to make this happen.
And that’s all for today from Disneyland Paris!
We’ve been out of our Disneyland Paris: From Sketch to Reality books for several months. But we have some good news for you. A small final shipment of English Edition copies will soon be available. You could wait until they go on sale in the MiceChat Store in the next week or two, OR you can contact [email protected] now to reserve your copy. They will likely sell out very quickly, so get your name on the list.
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