This article is the second in a two-part series. Be sure to read yesterday’s piece, Whispers, a broad collection of recent Busch Gardens Williamsburg rumors, before proceeding!
Utility Markings
About a week ago I got a message from friend of the site, ParkFans member, and public record monitoring extraordinaire, Jahrules. He tipped me off to a very curious utility marking ticket, which was filed for Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s property on April 22nd. Most of the time utility marking tickets aren’t all that notable—the vast majority are filed ahead of minor work that doesn’t even justify a passing mention. There is one, consistent exception to that rule though: tickets requesting marking ahead of soil boring and testing.
Here’s the ticket in question:
Historically, I think we’ve been able to pair every single soil boring and testing ticket we’ve ever seen for Busch Gardens Williamsburg to a major, in-development, construction project of some sort. When we see “Type of Work: Soil Boring and Testing,” it’s an instant red alert situation.
Now, typically, these marking tickets will provide, at minimum, a general location to be marked by responding utility locators. As you can see in the image above though, this ticket was uncharacteristically cryptic—requesting only that utility locators call for more details or meet the park on-site for a location plan. To work out the location of this ticket, we’d have to go deeper.
When a utility marking ticket is filed, third party utility locators representing the various interests who could potentially have utilities in the area are dispatched out to the site to work out whether or not the area in question conflicts with any of their utilities. If a given utility doesn’t have lines in the area requested, they’ll leave a No Conflict response to the ticket. Similarly, if the utility does have lines in the area, they’ll be marked by the locator and some sort of affirmative response will be left on the marking ticket.
Normally these responses aren’t very informative. We don’t have utility maps of Busch Gardens Williamsburg to work from, so whether or not any given utility marks on any given project doesn’t typically aid in narrowing down a project’s location. That said, there is one giant exception to that rule: the Colonial Pipeline Company.
For those of you who may not know, a major oil pipeline, the Colonial Pipeline, runs directly through Busch Gardens Williamsburg. If you’ve ever noticed a weird, barren, tree-less scar straight across the park, it was probably the Colonial Pipeline’s easement —the area around the Colonial Pipeline that is now required to be kept clear of all trees and most structures. An approximate map of the pipeline’s easement through the park’s guest-facing areas can be found below.
Well, on April 24th, guess who marked for this new soil boring and testing ticket at Busch Gardens Williamsburg: the Colonial Pipeline Company.
Looking back through all of the utility marking tickets that have been filed for BGW’s property thus far this year, only two have resulted in positive responses by the Colonial Pipeline Company: the Heatherdowns Stables fence replacement project and this new soil boring and testing work.
Given that the Heatherdowns fence replacement project occurred months ago and has long-since wrapped, if we were able to locate fresh, new Colonial Pipeline markings within the park, we’d know the location of this upcoming soil boring and testing work and, hence, the likely home of Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s next capital expenditure.
With that, I went out to Busch Gardens Williamsburg on April 25th to do some investigatin’. Fortunately, with a little help from friend of the site and ParkFans member, Le Moose, I’m confident we found the work area we went lookin’ for. Below is a photo of far and away the most obvious, fresh Colonial Pipeline markings we found.
From what we could tell, the Colonial Pipeline markings end before Loch Ness Monster crosses the pipeline easement and then before the base of the ravine separating the hill pictured above from San Marco. I’ve included an approximate map of the markings we could see along the pipeline below.
To provide a rough view of how the pipeline markings interact with the terrain in the area, I’ve included a 3D Google Earth render below:
At this point, progress on this story stalled a bit. This was a potentially pretty enormous scoop, but the resulting story really just amounted to a potential work area entirely based on some utility markings in a difficult-to-access and difficult-to-utilize area of the park.
I wrote up the proceeding article, Whispers, alongside the first draft of this article last weekend, but the payoff felt hollow. As suggested in Whispers, I had heard rumors about this area, but the original version of this piece required obsessively writing around the specifics of those rumors. In doing so, the finished product felt weak and lacked a strong theory of the case. Thankfully, my procrastination paid off.
RPA Impacts Waiver
On Friday morning, May 2nd, Jahrules hit me up again with another public records tip. This one turned that red alert situation described above into a five-alarm fire. On April 30th, Busch Gardens Williamsburg filed a Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act (CBPA) Resource Protection Area (RPA) waiver with James City County (JCC). A screenshot of the permit’s metadata as filed with JCC is included below.
The CBPA RPA buffer zone (overlayed over the park’s waterways and neighboring land areas in the map below) is any area in the park within 100 feet of any of the park’s Rhine River-connected creeks, streams, inlets, etc. Any development that infringes upon these portions of the park’s property requires a separate site plan submittal as part of one of these CBPA RPA waivers.
In other words, given this plan’s description—“this project proposes a perpendicular crossing of the RPA with a structure within Busch Gardens”—we know this project involves traversing the full width of one of the blue areas in the map above.
Given the location of the Colonial Pipeline markings discussed above, as of the morning of May 2nd, we could reasonably estimate that the RPA this project is slated to cross is likely the finger that sticks up between San Marco and Loch Ness Monster towards Escape from Pompeii.
Fortunately, we wouldn’t need to estimate for long. Upon receiving the news of this filing, ParkFans co-owner and BGWFans tech wizard, Gavin, ran out to the James City County offices to try to obtain a copy of the new permit. Within hours of first learning about the waiver, we had hard copies in-hand.
Below I’ve included the CBPA RPA impacts map filed with James City County for this new mystery project.
The most important information to know from the document’s key is that the green shaded areas are for planned, permanent, impervious areas. To put that in layman’s terms, the green shaded areas are the portions of the site within the CBPA RPA zone which will be made up of solid structures at ground level—areas of the ground which will be unreachable by rain due to being covered by a permanent, solid material.
Though this site plan only includes the fragments of proposed development within 100 feet of CBPA-protected waterways, the document still manages to reveal a ton of immensely useful information for our decoding purposes.
First off, the top right segment of the plan clearly depicts a pedestrian bridge traversing the ravine between Da Vinci’s Garden of Invention and the flatter area of land where the pipeline has been marked. The bridge runs from the current queue area between The Little Gliders and The Little Balloons to some sort of new plaza to the south of Escape from Pompeii.
This is a pretty lengthy bridge for the record—somewhere in excess of 150 feet probably. To put that in context, both the bridge between Heatherdowns and Killarney and the crossing from New France to Rhinefeld are somewhere around 100 feet in length. At 150 feet or more, the separation between this new viaduct’s start point in Da Vinci’s Garden of Invention and this new plaza south of Pompeii will be quite significant—likely plenty sufficient to thematically separate whatever this project is from Da Vinci’s Garden.
Then, we have the even more exciting part: the plan calls for the construction of wide, curvy, impervious areas towards the end of the peninsula between Loch Ness Monster’s loops and San Marco. Incredibly, whatever this impervious area is manages to travel well under Loch Ness Monster as well—filling in a large portion of the infield for the turn following Nessie’s second lift hill.
Another item visible in this plan is that fishhook-shaped, path-looking element that crosses the pipeline easement. I believe this is a planned realignment of the existing service road that can be faintly seen off to the right. Both are highlighted in the image below.
Repositioning this service road closer to Loch Ness Monster’s second lift hill is likely an attempt to free up more space through the middle, far flatter area of the peninsula where all of this work is taking place.
So, Uh, What Is It?
That’s the million-dollar question, right? Well, I have some thoughts.
First off, lets talk about the Colonial Pipeline easement. Though exceptions were granted earlier in Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s life to the restrictions of the pipeline easement (clear cutting requirements were waived, limited development encroachments were permitted, etc), in more recent times, the rules have become much stricter. About 10 years ago the Colonial Pipeline Corporation resumed clearing their easement through the park’s property and all recent easement-bordering developments at the park have been painstakingly designed to avoid even the smallest of easement infringements. Finnigan’s Flyer and Pantheon are excellent examples of this.
Now, as the site plan above clearly lays out for us, the Colonial Pipeline crosses directly through this area. Though it’s not impossible that United Parks and the Colonial Pipeline Corporation could have worked out some sort of exception to allow, say, a coaster, to cross the pipeline easement, given that Project Madrid and Pantheon both seem to have been designed explicitly to avoid this, I don’t think it’s all that likely. Plus, a coaster almost certainly wouldn’t explain the wide, continuous, equal width, snake of impervious area at ground level depicted in the RPA impacts document in the first place.
Secondly, lets talk about timeline. Historically, ahead of any big construction project at the park, we expect a series of checkpoints to be passed in a pretty consistent order. That order looks something like this: zoning (often height) waivers, soil testing for design/feasibility needs, RPA impacts approval for environmental encroachments, full site plans for planning approval, and then building permits for construction approval. There are often some extras sprinkled in there—stormwater-specific plans for instance—as well, but that’s the broad, typical outline for the development we see reported publicly at BGW.
Because we’ve made it all the way to RPA impacts plan submittal and we have yet to see a height waiver filed, an exception to the county’s zoning regulations for structure height is likely not required for this project. The height limit for development on BGW property is 60 feet above grade and, hence, we can reasonably estimate that no part of this new construction is slated to exceed that height.
Another note on timeline here as well. Given that we have a partial site plan filed and it’s only May, this project appears to me to be on course for a 2026 opening right now. The park could always just be moving at a blistering pace to get approvals and then, ultimately, hold off on any actual construction, but right now I do think it’s reasonable to estimate that this is Busch Gardens Williamsburg’s Project 2026.
Now, lets talk land use. The snake-like impervious area depicted could be guest pathways, yeah? They could be, but I don’t think they are. Even measuring as the crow flies, the walking path distance required to get people from the start of the new bridge at Da Vinci’s Garden back to Nessie’s infield is like 560-ish feet. What could possibly justify that much guest pathway expansion? What would these theoretical paths even go to? The plans don’t show anything along the furthest extent of these winding impervious areas and any theoretical structures out there would be contending with Nessie anyway. Given that these impervious areas are the furthest-out portion of this plan, I struggle to fathom a justification for these being new guest pathways.
Cool, So, Like, What Is It Then?
So, what could cross the pipeline easement with immunity, not require any structure to reach 60 feet above grade, and would justify a wide, curvy, impervious space to travel all the way out to the furthest reaches of the flat top of this peninsula?
I believe we may be looking at some sort of at least partially ground-based tracked ride here. My mind immediately goes to some sort of car or train ride with an entrance on the north side of the Colonial Pipeline easement near Pompeii and a ride area meandering around the rest of the peninsula south of the easement and under Loch Ness Monster. We know roads and rail can both cross the pipeline at ground-level. Either of these attraction types would result in a continuous, winding impervious area like what we see in the plans too. Both also stay at or near ground-level explaining the lack of a height waiver and the low clearance below Loch Ness Monster.
With this theory of the case, the potential attraction impact area would likely stick to the relatively flat land in the middle of the peninsula and to the right of the planned service road realignment. That would give us roughly this space to work with:
A (Nostalgic) Theory
Call me crazy, but if I were to place a bet right now, I suspect we may be looking at a spiritual successor to the iconic, opening day Busch Gardens Williamsburg antique car ride: Le Mans. Hear me out.
The impervious area in the plans is pretty wide—notably wider than that realigned backstage service road and the surrounding guest thoroughfares. At first glance, that seems much too wide to be a railroad track or other, similar, single-tracked ride. A side-by-side, dual track antique car ride though? That could make the width of the impervious area make some real sense!
Then, there’s the fact that we already have a railroad. Yes, SeaWorld San Antonio added a kiddy train this year, but they don’t have a full-sized railroad to contend with. Meanwhile, what ride type don’t we have anymore? An antique car ride. Maybe there are some other ground-based, meandering, tracked ride possibilities that I’m not thinking of immediately, but there are other hints that looking at history may make a lot of sense here.
Consider that Busch Gardens Williamsburg has been making nostalgia play after nostalgia play for years now—and seeing great success with it too, I might add. DarKoaster, Nessie 2024, Wolf’s Revenge—they all share one through-line: nostalgia capitalization. Oh, and of course, it’s currently the park’s 50th anniversary. Imagine the reaction amongst fans and local media if Busch Gardens Williamsburg actually announced the return of Le Mans during the park’s 50th anniversary—people would go nuts.
Given Wolf’s Revenge, the precedent for this scale of nostalgia-focused investment is certainly there now. Like Big Bad Wolf, generations of locals grew up with Le Mans. Offering those folks the opportunity to bring their kids back to the park to experience the same? Poetic.
Lastly, thematically, there are great opportunities here. Just like France, Italy has a strong racing heritage. Capitalizing on the same theme as Le Mans but with an Italian angle almost seems too perfect to pass up. If they wanted to go all out with the Le Mans parallel, Italy has its own famous, 1920s-era, historic, endurance race, the Mille Miglia—it’s literally the Italian version of the real Le Mans.
With all that hype out of the way though, I will concede that there are, technically, other potential explanations. Maybe we really are looking at far-flung guest pathways for some reason I can’t currently imagine. Maybe it’s a train ride with a really wide track area. Maybe it’s some sort of other ground-based tracked ride that I haven’t considered yet. Maybe only part of the layout for whatever this is takes place at ground-level and there are elevated portions in the areas yet-to-be-revealed. Maybe it’s just a winding array of backstage service roads with a large bridge for guest access for some currently inexplicable reason. Hell, maybe the plans won’t end up coming to fruition at all—right now it’s anyone’s guess. In the meantime though, in the absence of new information, I’ll keep my fingers crossed that we are looking at the spiritual successor to my much-beloved Le Mans. 🤞
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Thanks for reading! ♥️
Well done!! However, I would be shocked if it was an antique car ride due to maintenance costs. They have obviously been shying away or removing those types of rides (Darkastle and Ireland dark ride).
Thanks for all the information!!
Could you do an overlay of the original Le mans layout over this area and see if it would fit? I know it won’t be an exact layout but just to see if it’s close to the same space. To me this new area seems to small for a car ride.
If the pedestrian bridge comes out where the queues are for the little gliders and the balloons I know of 2 empty flat pads where these rides could be relocated.
Hello and I am a big fan of BGW and my last visit was 2022; I was impressed with Pathelon but was a little disappointed because it should had had some theming; I am sorry to hear The Flying Machine and Mach Tower to get chopped; but come on BWG you need to replace those rides. What about a nice size Ferris wheel; every park seem to have a Ferris wheel. They are good for scenery depending on the size. They are good family theme rides. Get a Ferris wheel come on now you have awesome Roller Coasters (I love Alpengeist and Loch Ness monster). Get a few good flat rides even go back to some old one and have fans votes for what oldie they would like to see come to the park. I think one of those Sky rides would be great — the one that takes you up and swing you around giving you a good view of the park. I may be naming it wrong but I think you get the idea. Or maybe get one of those drop towers like they they have two sides to them. One goes up slowly and drops you quickly while the other one goes up fast ad drops you. You should take surveys in what fans like and what are they favors rides. Take surveys from Carnivals they always have good rides they have great rides even though they are portable.
Keep up the good work though and trust me when I get another chance I will come back to visit you because you are my favorite park. I never been to your brother park in Tampa. I do like two dive coasters your park have even though I like Griffon because of it color and the tunnel. Nothing beats Nessie and Alpengeist is awesome love that first drop.
Please review my comments thoroughly and get some good flat rides so that your park will continue to be the most beautiful park around. Oh yeah one more thing, depending on your budget I think you should follow your brother park (BGT) and maybe get a coaster like Iron Gawaii since everybody always talk about it and gives it good review.