If you’ve ever wondered how to build a dark ride, in this post, we’ll show you how we Built the Forbidden Caves at Bobbejaanland.

It’s now approaching five years since the Forbidden Caves at Bobbejaanland opened to the public. It’s one of those projects that ran perfectly from the start of the design to the final handover. It’s certainly one we are proud of here at Garmendale. So, we thought that to mark the five year anniversary, we would share a more detailed story of how the ride came to be. We’ll have a full look back at the whole process, from early drawings to the finished ride being installed and welcoming its first, slightly terrified, customers. 

The challenge was to create a new type of dark ride. One that was capable of delivering 60 passengers into the heart of an immersive tunnel and bring a story to life around them, that was truly immersive and to the same exceptional standard for every rider. The first decision taken was to move away from the industry-standard route of hydraulic control, in favour of the all-new electric control. If we could pull it off, it would allow a far quieter delivery into the heart of the ride and allow us to extend service periods and minimise breakdowns – always an issue with hydraulics. 

But perhaps the biggest issue was the timescale. Design a brand new ride system, fabricate it, test it, deliver it, get it approved by the testing bodies and install it. All in around six months. We do like a challenge here at Garmendale, so working with our partners for the project, Holovis who were providing the projection for the ride, we began in earnest. 

The first stage was to work up concept drawings. As the ideas took shape, these were developed into more detailed plans. You can see some of the early ideas and working parameters here. 

It soon became apparent that the ride would work much better with two cars carrying 30 people than trying to create an enormous megastructure for 60. Whilst we know we could have built it, the engineering required would have been cost-prohibitive and the level of immersion into the story we were looking for, would have been nigh on impossible to achieve. 

With the design agreed, the engineering team started the fabrication. As you can see from the following photos, this in itself, was a major task and although the end product looks different to anything we’d built before, the process we followed was quite similar to other builds. It’s a case of building up the core components from the ground up and ensuring everything is non destructively tested throughout. That way, when it comes to type approval testing before we go live, we’ve already jumped through many of the hurdles we’re going to have to face later on anyway.