Our Favorite Walt Disney World Thrill Ride Queues

Imagineers are known for creating some of our favorite stories in the Disney Parks, and it all starts before you even hop in a mine cart or a flying pirate ship. The queue line might be where you’re sticking it out before you board your favorite attraction, but it’s also where Disney sets the tone for the adventure you’re about to live.

We’re taking a look at a few of our favorite queues for Walt Disney World’s thrill rides to appreciate all of the awesome details the Imagineers include to tell their stories.

Expedition Everest

Before you make your embarkation up to the Forbidden Mountain, you first have to weave through the queue of Expedition Everest. The attention to detail starts as you enter the offices of Himalayan Escapes to pick up your permits.

You wander past gardens and shrines to the yeti, beginning to set the tone for the attraction. Eventually you make your way into the Yeti Museum, a collection of artifacts that seem to imply that the yeti is more than a myth.

Before you even make it to the converted tea trains, the queue of Expedition Everest is already getting you ready for the adventure and setting a foreboding tone.

The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

At the end of Sunset Boulevard, the Hollywood Tower Hotel looms large. As you make your way to the once-grand hotel, you walk through the gardens and terraces until you enter the hotel’s lobby.

The dusty hotel lobby is a shadow of what it once was. Cobwebs cover old newspapers and luggage left behind. Eventually, you are led into the hotel’s library by a bellhop.

After watching the weirdest ad for a hotel ever, you make your way into the boiler room where you prepare to board the maintenance service elevator. Again, Disney injects that little bit of foreboding through set design to give us just the right amount of thrill at the end.

Flight of Passage

It’s hard to really know where the line for Flight of Passage begins and the world of Pandora ends. The trail winds its way up into the caves just behind the mountains, where drawings of the banshees native to the planet have been scrawled on the walls.

It’s here where the natural world and technological world meet, as the caves lead to an old RDA facility where Alpha Centauri Expeditions has now begun to peacefully study the world of Pandora. An Avatar lies floating in a tube, possibly waiting to be connected to one of us.

We finally make it to the genetic matching room to connect to an Avatar and get ready for our Flight of Passage. Even though the movie is 11 years old at this point, we still get all the information we need about the banshees or Ikrans and Na’vi culture from the immersive queue.

Rise of the Resistance

The queue for Rise of the Resistance in Galaxy’s Edge may not even feel like a line but just another part of the ride. It all starts when you walk underneath the large laser cannon into Resistance Forest.

As new recruits for the Resistance, we are tasked with a critical mission by Rey at the Resistance base and are led into a transport that will take us off Batuu. We might be standing, but the transport lifting off and getting captured by the First Order feels like a ride by itself.

The doors open into a huge First Order Star Destroyer hangar complete with a legion of Stormtroopers and TIE Fighters. We are escorted to the prison cells where we will be interrogated by Kylo Ren, but luckily some Resistance members break us out. This is where the ride truly “begins”.

Even before we’re boarding our transport for our daring escape, it feels like we’re living a Star Wars adventure because of the immersive details and extensive storytelling.

What is your favorite queue in the Disney Parks? Let us know down in the comments!

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