Diggerland Yorkshire: The Castleford attraction dedicated to diggers

To mark World Tourism Day on 27th September, we ventured to Diggerland Yorkshire in Castleford to discover their dedicated digger attraction.

Transcript

00:00My name's Tom Evans and I'm Chief Marshal at Diggoland Yorkshire. I've been at Diggoland

00:04Yorkshire since August 2021. I became Chief Marshal in July 2022 and my role mainly entails

00:12safety checks in the morning to make sure the park is running smoothly in the morning.

00:17Through the day I'll deal with any customer queries and I do occasional audits to make sure

00:22that staff are being enthusiastic and presentable as they usually are. I'm Brad, one of the

00:28supervisors here at Diggoland. It's a really unique site, there's not many places where you

00:33can go and hop on a digger. There's plenty of things to do, plenty of different rides and

00:38drives, starting with some of your smaller rides for your smaller kids. Everything's height-based

00:44so it's not like it goes off edge so as long as you're tall enough for the rides you can get on.

00:49There's a few rides where you get to drive the machines yourself as you would on a construction

00:52site. There's a few rides that we've modified to bring a challenge element for the children.

00:57So we've got Komatsu PC-14s which you turn into a bowling ride where you're not on skittles

01:03or we've got Huckaduck with a digger which is quite entertaining. We've got plenty of rides,

01:08different experiences and some you get driven around so we've got the ground shuttle to the

01:13right of me here where you sit in the bucket of a telehandler and you get bounced about a bit.

01:19It tends to be more popular with the children and the adults. Then we've got Spin Dizzy which is

01:23probably the main attraction of a ride where you're in the bucket of a PC-210 and you're

01:27spinning around with two G's of force coming at you from both sides. Everyone just seems to be

01:32drawn to diggers. We get it a lot especially with little kids that come in. You speak to parents

01:37especially on some of the rides where you're sat down interacting with the customers a lot,

01:42one-on-one. You're talking to the parents and it's straight away kids just are obsessed with

01:48diggers so they bring them down. I don't really know what it is with them but like I say everyone

01:52just seems to be drawn to them. We get it all the time. Parents are bringing kids down just

01:59because the kids are obsessed with them and parents too. You get adults that come down and

02:03just say you know I've always wanted to operate a digger. It's a massive thing with like children's

02:08culture is diggers. I don't know how long it's been a thing but I know when I was a child

02:12diggers were massive. You know you have Bob the Builder on TV. I think it's just something that

02:17goes all through your childhood like it's the obsession with how big they are, how powerful

02:21they are. Yeah I think it's universal. It'll go on forever. We do a lot of experiences as well

02:27over on site so doing that like say you get your one-on-one with people, getting to know people,

02:34having a conversation. Yeah that's probably my favourite part of the job just getting them

02:39experiences in and getting to do that with people and giving people a chance to do something they've

02:45never done before and seeing them enjoy it. I remember in summer we had someone come over from

02:48Lithuania. I don't know if that was the sole purpose to be at Diggerland but they ended up

02:53here so we're happy that we get international tourists as well as local tourists.