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'cor, does it really take 71 minutes to do Amersham, Chesham and Watford...

I tried a full challenge once and didn't get round to doing Amersham, Chesham and Watford. Thankfully.

On both my 1st and 2nd attempt I started at Amersham at 0528 and arrived at Watford at 0629, 3 minutes ahead of schedule. On the first attempt I made up time following a lucky change at Moor Park.

CrunchySaviour wrote:I tried a full challenge once and didn't get round to doing Amersham, Chesham and Watford. Thankfully.

It was a bit of a shame that Amersham was your starting station on that attempt

Geoff's Tube 3 writeup says to always go to Epping first (rather than round the loop) -- how does this work? (my notes currently say "get first northbound train" at Stratford).

Thinking about through trains to places -- do all the Mill Hill East trains currently come from the Charing X branch, or is it actually worth getting on a High Barnet train at CX and changing at Finchley Central?

Senji wrote:Thinking about through trains to places -- do all the Mill Hill East trains currently come from the Charing X branch, or is it actually worth getting on a High Barnet train at CX and changing at Finchley Central?

Personally, I would not wait - I would get the first train and change.

According to LU - all Mill Hill East trains, off peak, should originate from the Charing Cross Branch - Kennington starters I believe - however in practice - that does not always work!

If I'm at least fairly sure about it then I'll probably plan to get on the first train and drop back at Goodge Street for a photo if it's not a Mill Hill East...

We don't double back at Goodge St, but we have a plan for getting that bench photo..

Just you wait and see..

We will be exiting the system at Goodge Street and doing a surface level change.

I'm just writing up my route so its in a nice booklet format with maps etc - just looking at these different ideas I'm beginning to see how many different routes are actually doable... it's like playing a game of chess on a board with 270+ squares and hundreds of pawns - there must be thousands of permutations

On the subject of Mill Hill East, can I just comment that you can change at East Finchley or Finchley Central for the Mill Hill East service if you aren't on a through train.

The reason I suggest changing at East Finchley is because it has particularly interesting 1930s architecture (note the rounded skylights, wrap-around glass windows at the ends of the platforms and of course, if you have a little bit of time, a quick exit of the station to take a photo of the archer firing his arrows in the direction of Barnet - not to be missed!). More about him can be found here:

http://www.the-archer.co.uk/history/lonely_archer.htm

Probably my favourite station, closely followed by Oakwood which resembles a 1930s cinema and Bounds Green which really wanted to be a UFO woooh!

Changing somewhere for architectural reasons has to be one of the more bizarre suggestions we've had so far ...

tubeguru wrote:Changing somewhere for architectural reasons has to be one of the more bizarre suggestions we've had so far ...

I can think of sillier reasons...Changing at somewhere like Cockfosters or Arsenal just because they've got rude names (if your mind runs on innuendo)...

Cheers,

Barry

It probably is a daft idea, but that's what I really love about the London Underground - the architecture of stations The Piccadilly line at its extremities in general and, more recently of course, the Jubilee line extension... some of those stations are absolutely breathtaking