Hey everybody!
As Chris says it was fairly late on that I got this sorted. It was prompted by Barton’s claim that he had a 15h route. Reading the forum posts it was clear not everyone was convinced by this, thinking he must have missed something somewhere, but why not? Is there a way to demonstrate what the fastest possible time is without knowing the route?
He got me thinking and I ended up doing this analysis a couple of weeks ago about the
minimum theoretical time to visit the 270 London Underground stations. It came out at 15h 18m. Other interpretations and assumptions are available…(insights and improvements to the approach appreciated. Also if you think it’s too much information to have public, let me know, I don’t want to spoil things.)
Looking at the Tube Challenge fresh after a few years (and, credit where it’s due, on one point prompted by something Mr Barton had said about his route) I noticed a few ways I could tweak mine for the better. I also put my old route through journey planner and noticed that some of the stretches had faster running trains now.
In total I ended up with a couple of options with different start times that comfortably beat Geoff and Anthony’s time by quite some margin and I thought, ah, go on then, I’ll just do it every day this week until it works, easy...
But as I’m sure everyone on this forum is aware, paper times and actual times are not the same thing!
Tuesday:
The second train of the day from C&L back out to Amersham showed up 15 minutes late, so that was a bit annoying. To put it mildly.
Wednesday:
Going ok until there was a broken down train on the Jubilee line. I had just run to Stanmore when the line shut down for 30 minutes or so, and not being in the centre meant I was completely out of alternative options. That killed it.
Thursday:
I hoped to avoid the crowds with a different start time, but was spotted by Tractakid. Firstly, let me apologise to you! I was quite flustered you recognised me, and wanted to talk to you for longer than the 10 seconds we did, but I was pretty stressed about my trainers (more below) and the time and wanted to get into Chesham and the first thing I could think of to cut short the conversation politely was “Er, I’m just going to get some supplies...”. But alas, that was only the beginning of my amateurishness of the day...
The new trainers I had were far too slippery in the wet and I couldn’t run properly – thankfully the gf brought me a different pair later on, but the slowness had already accumulated into being many trains down.
http://youtu.be/tjhTqGSmQYY
By early evening my phone battery died meaning I had to do the last two runs without Google maps, and got them both wrong costing more time. You’d be surprised how hard it is to get someone in 2 minutes to explain to you “how do I run from Mill Hill East to Finchley Central?” when
• You are both on a train due to leave Finchley Central to go to Mill Hill East.
• The same train comes back to Finchley Central in 5 minutes anyway.
• They are adamant that the choice of where to get off the train to exit the station is between left and right, not front and back, and you use at least 1.5 minutes up on that.
Heading out to Heathrow at the end of the day it looked to be just out of reach as there was a big gap in the Heathrow service with everything for the next 10+ minutes going out on the Uxbridge branch. It didn’t help that I almost made the worst connection ever earlier on the line (in fairness, everyone else on the first train had the same first thought as me):
http://youtu.be/brMn4sUK1R4
However, we carried on with a 1% hope that the T4-bound train wouldn't wait at T4 before stating back to central London, and would go straight around again to 123 to regulate the service. In this case we'd have a shot of a quick connection to the T5 departure to possibly beat the record by a v small amount of time.
But it didn't, it waited at T4, so that was that.
In the end it was a 16:3something completion but I stopped paying attention once the signal board at T4 said 7 minutes (Nigel, Chris, I take back the “16:2something” I wrote to you on Friday. I had just presumed it would have been a high 16:2something but speaking to Kate yesterday she’s certain the stopwatch was already onto 16:3something - 16:36 she thinks - when I got off the train at T5 to meet her).
Friday:
I stay asleep in bed until midday. I wake up. My girlfriend is not there anymore. I hate the tube.
Olympia Thoughts:
I ended up in the control room at Earl’s Court on Monday, i.e., the day before the Olympia service started. The difference between i) how helpful the staff are and ii) how backward the process/infrastructure is was quite marked.
I asked a group of 4 staff on the platform to confirm what time the Olympia services would be tomorrow. Only one had an idea there could be any. A few minutes later I am in the control room and another couple of people are trying to find out for me. They work out that indeed there will be a different service, but do not have those particular 2 pages of printed information in their binder that gives the revision to the timetable.
It’s not available online anywhere for them.
They start phoning around various acronyms (I don’t know what they stood for) and eventually find a controller or a manager or District Line God or something who has a copy.
That person then has to fax it to them.
In total it was the best part of ¾ of an hour to get the information on the trains that would be going through their station the next day. As I say, the difference between i) and ii) was quite startling.
As someone else has written, the Olypmia service didn’t always run according to this timetable anyway. I waited for one on Wednesday that left [having got into] Earl’s Court 14 minutes late. The guy on the platform didn’t know if it was coming or not, couldn’t find out, and thought I was a moron for not taking his advice to go to West Brompton and switch to the Overland every time a Wimbledon train left next to us. (“Why are you still waiting, you could have been there by now mate...”).
Beer thoughts:
The reason we all did this was because of the beer festival. So how about a meetup over a beer and share our stories of the day? What about this Wednesday at King’s Cross/St Pancras, say around 5pm so it’s early enough for Tube_b to join? Tracktakid, can I buy you a beer?
Cheers,
Marc