On Sunday, 14th October 2007 Thanet Observer asked "Hands up anyone who thinks that the wooden Dreamland Scenic Railway will soon suffer a mysterious disastrous fire..."

kentonline.co.uk has a photo of People watching the Scenic Railway Burn (for which there had been a Statitory requirement to keep). It got me to thinking about the reaction to this disaster around Thanet. A large number of people phoned me up to tell me about the fire and all were totally shocked so what are the general feelings around Thanet?

"Margate is lost now. They may as well wipe it off the map."
Big Stevie B, Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain, Forum.

Feelings seem to roughly fall into two kinds - shock disbelief and sadness on one hand ("Is this true? OMG, this is terrible." [Becks045]) and anger directed towards Jimmy Godden on the other ("Jimmy Godden is very unlucky with fires" [c anderson]). People are asking how one man can have so many (convenient) fires happen to him. The comments at youtube are rather "blue" and not repeatable venting quite hard on our local property rich man.

One thing seems consistent and that is the widely held belief that this was inevitable because the club that is "the council", Jimmy Godden and Friends wanted to build there. "Bad news that was always going to happen it was the only thing left that was stopping flats being built." says southend_marc on the coasterforce.com forums.

The person who summed it all up best for me was Tony Flaig of Big News Margate in a video he posted to his blog wherein he more-or-less said there will probably be a lot of crocodile tears and then they will pull it down. See Tony's exact words (also posted on his blog)- within the comments Anonymous of Tue Apr 08, 09:11:00 AM says "It would seem that if he is having problems redeveloping one of his sites all of a sudden it seems to burn down!! Ramsgate, Margate, Folkestone!! COME ON!!!..."

Margate Architecture begs us to Say it isn't so but sadly it is.

Style Counsel gives us a nostalgic look at images of the parks good times and says: "...it was the news that everybody feared".

Meanwhile a kind user at "Joyland Books, The Amusement Park and Fairground Forum" has posted three images that bloggers are free to use in reporting the story: 1, 2, 3. Else where a photographer has posted an entire gallery of images here for us all to share the sad last moments of the attraction. The save dreamland campaign news has a long entry on the subject inking to other reporting on the news and images posted around the web it can be found here.

Will be updated as new sources are uncovered - feel free to share your own (links in the link field are followed by search engines but not links in the post)