We made it out to Epcot today to take a look at the all-new themed windbreakers, and while exiting the park, we decided to check-in on the latest progress taking place for the arrival experience overhaul. As you may know, all four Walt Disney World theme parks are receiving an overhaul to their arrival experiences. So far, Disney’s Hollywood Studios is making the most progress, with Magic Kingdom yet to see a groundbreaking. Epcot is in second place currently behind Disney’s Hollywood Studios, with the arrival experience work expected to be mostly complete by the end of the year.

We’ll go through this update by following the walking route that we took to get the photos. It should also provide you with a bit better sense of direction when figuring out where everything is. We’ll start by walking up the ramp to the monorail station. We get our first peek past the construction walls on either side of the walkway. Up until this point, most of the work has been on creating new pathways for the utilities that will support the new arrival experience. We can see a manhole cover on in the bottom left of the image, and some red tape around another utility area.

The opposite down ramp shows a mirrored view of the construction work.

Back to our walk up the ramp to the monorail station, we get a wonderful view of the new tram drop off area. The new drop off area will be further away from the main entrance than the old drop off area, but only by less than 200′. It was quite a busy afternoon, with crews working on the rebar that will reinforce the perimeter wall on the new tram loop.

We saw the new Toy Story wrap as Monorail Yellow passed by.

If we continue up the ramp by turning to our right, we can see more work taking place next to the monorail station, as well as the Guardians of the Galaxy roller coaster building off in the distance. As of right now, it’s unclear what this area will be used for. It seems unlikely that it will be used for the Imagine/Explore/Wonder tram loop given the way that the land has been worked on, but time will tell.

If we now start our descent from the exit ramp from the monorail station, we get a good look at the work taking place on the west side of the station.

This area will not be used for parking lot tram traffic moving forward, but Disney has yet to comment on what we could see in this area.

A few more photos of the area, showing some of the utilities work taking place.

As we walk down the exit ramp, we can see a lot of construction equipment staged nearby.

As of right now, there is no work taking place at the entrance tap points, but half of the Leave a Legacy monoliths have been removed. Walls have yet to be installed around the eastern monoliths.

Finally, here’s a look at another area of interest along the former tram roadway to the eastern side of the parking lot. If we had to guess, this seems like a good place to put the Imagine/Explore/Wonder tram loop. It would be further away from the entrance than the old tram loop, but that seems to be the trend at Walt Disney World.