Ride Profile
Rick Turner
Big Sheep makes
a big noise! UK farm park realises rollercoaster dream
Big coaster’s little history
Built originally for the Metroland indoor theme park at the Metro Centre in Gateshead near Newcastle upon Tyne, The Big Sheep’s new family coaster began life back in 1988 known simply as The Roller Coaster. The 365m-long attraction is a custom model Tivoli coaster from Zierer featuring two tyre-driven lift hills, the tallest of which stands almost 15 metres. Lasting around 1 minute, the ride reaches a top speed of 27 mph (43km) and features a single 14 car/28 seat train. Prior to its installation at the park
in North Devon, the attraction was fully refurbished by Sean Brian and his team from Amusement Technical near Blackpool, which was awarded the contract to remove all the rides from Metroland after its closure back in 2008. As well as stripping the coaster back to its bones, crack-testing all components repainting the track and rebuilding the train, the company also installed a new control system. Following the upgrade the ride looks like new, and is now putting a big smile on the faces of many visitors to The Big Sheep.
After a multi-year planning battle, The Big Sheep in Devon opened its long-awaited ‘Big One’ rollercoaster just before Easter. Billed as the biggest coaster in the South West, the custom-designed Zierer Tivoli ride was relocated from the Metro Centre shopping mall in the North East of England. During the five-year wait to get it open, Rick Turner – director of the flock at the UK farm park – found himself screaming loudly on several occasions, yet he had the last laugh recently when the ride featured at the centre of an unplanned, but very welcome, media storm. Here Rick shares his story with Park World readers. Ewe won’t believe it!
T
he Big Sheep is one of Devon’s largest all-weather attractions, and I am proud to say that thanks to our committed flock we have picked up several local
awards. Yet even though we are probably one of the top five farm parks in the UK, we’ve never actually won the Farm Attraction of the Year award! I think that’s because we do a lot of other things. Our sheep dog trails, sheep racing and horse whispering are very popular, but we’ve also got a splash centre, combat zone, extreme activities and a number of rides as well as Ewetopia, our big indoor play centre. We do about 150-160,000 a year attendance, so we’ve never really been a theme park, but we’re not just a farm park either. One of the reasons we do what we do and strive for a
certain quality level is that we have quite a lot of local competition in North Devon, whether it’s the Milky Way park less than 10 miles away, Watermouth Castle, Exmoor Zoo or several wildlife parks. The coaster is the first time we’ve put in a big ride. It’s been very stressful, but it’s a great ride and no one else has anything like it in this part of the country. I remember going up to the Metro Centre to look at it. I
knew it was for sale and I thought that it would just be fantastic if we could put it into The Big Sheep because it would blow all our competitors out of the water. In the event, it actually cost a lot more money than I thought! A new coaster of this size would probably set you back you around £2.5 million ($3.5m/€3m), which I could never afford, but it’s still been pretty much a million quid ($1.45/€1.25m) to get it up and running. I couldn’t believe how much everything cost, but thankfully it was spread out over quite a long period.
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Planning challenges We bought the ride in 2008, then spent four years trying to get planning permission, which caused an enormous amount of friction with the village. We got rejected twice, and at one stage I wasn’t quite sure if we were going to put it in or not, but we had a couple of good years so I thought let’s go for it. The reason they closed Metroland was the Metro Centre
wanted to put in a multiplex cinema, so they basically just wanted all the rides out. When it opened I think this was the world’s largest indoor rollercoaster, and for me the attraction was that it had been indoors for all of its life; it was massively over-specced because it was on the first floor of a shopping centre and I believed it could create a real impact down here in the South West. When the ride was installed at the Metro Centre, they built
the building around it, but to get it out we had to remove the side of the building and crane stuff out. The coaster was also designed originally to travel over other attractions. This means the track has a minimum height of 4.5 metres, and doesn’t get close to the ground at any stage. Amongst other changes, we have extended the station area and added a big staircase as an evacuation route on the second lift hill. We’ve been very grateful for the help and advice offered by Oakwood and Paultons, two other British parks that operate Tivoli Coasters, and also Zierer, who have been very generous with their time and supplied us with the original drawings when we needed to have a replacement beam made for one of the lift hills. We’ve also put in quite a lot of landscaping the area around the ride. One of the big issues with the planning application was noise. We spent £40,000 on a noise report, and many thousands more on noise abatement measures including building a massive earth mound in the middle to soak up the screams. And we’ve put up signs advising riders that “this a family ride – not a white knuckle ride. We love our neighbours. PLEASE DO NOT SHOUT OR SCREAM!” I don’t mind people screaming when they are
This staircase had to be bulilt as an escape route on the second lift hill
MAY 2016
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