The vampire ride is a suspended coaster that was originally built by Arrow Dynamics and opened in 1990. They subsequently went out of business and with no-one to maintain the increasingly unreliable ride, new hanging coaster cars were designed and built by our friends at Vekoma for a re-opening in 2002. As the name suggests, the ride sits in a Transylvanian-themed area and has been a popular ride ever since.

It’s a ride we know well and have worked on for nearly ten years. One of the bigger jobs we completed on the ride was the updating of the gearbox, drive chains and lift system – all to improve the overall reliability for the operator.

Chessington World of Adventures Vampire loading area

Roll forwards 15 years and with new safety standards to adhere to, the ride now requires an evacuation platform for the unlikely occurrence of a critical breakdown. Enter Garmendale, slightly scary stage left.

Our latest Vampire job is to design and build an evacuation platform for the ride to ensure that if there is a problem, the riders can be safely evacuated quickly and efficiently. The system we have created is again built to the latest BSEN 10/90 engineering standards and a beautiful piece of larger scale engineering.

The new evacuation platform for the vampire ride at Chessington

We’re also installing the platform, so this means extra groundworks and subterranean engineering too and part of our brief has been to create the foundations and the concrete pour, complete with rebar.

The huge platform for the vampire ride – note the rebar for the supports in the background too

The installation is taking place very shortly, so we will add new images for that as soon as they are available.