Thinking out loud

[Iain]

While I agree with that, there comes a point where avoiding double visits becomes inefficient and actually takes more time running or taking a bus etc than just accepting a double visit. In my experience if you get rid of one then it can introduce another one elsewhere.

[RJSRdg]

If you follow all lines right through the centre, you duplicate the following stations inside the Bottle:

Bond Street
Green Park
Oxford Circus
Piccadilly Circus
TCR
Leicester Square
Charing Cross
Holborn

However my FNC attempt a few weeks ago only duplicated one station within the Bottle (not saying which one!)

Only two fairly short runs needed, and no buses, although of course every change introduces a possibility of something going wrong (as anyone who has played The London Game will know....).

[miklcct]

If you follow all lines right through the centre, you duplicate the following stations inside the Bottle:

Bond Street
Green Park
Oxford Circus
Piccadilly Circus
TCR
Leicester Square
Charing Cross
Holborn

However my FNC attempt a few weeks ago only duplicated one station within the Bottle (not saying which one!)

Only two fairly short runs needed, and no buses, although of course every change introduces a possibility of something going wrong (as anyone who has played The London Game will know....).

Yes, but if I follow all east-west lines through the centre, I still need some ways to connect the north-south peripherial lines; if I attack all the lines in the north at once, stations such as Great Portland Street, Barbican, etc., will be missing using the standard Stanmore - Edgware and High Barnet - Cockfoster moves.

My way of thinking is to do the Central and Piccadilly as a whole, and also the Hammersmith & City and District as a whole as well. This leaves Warren Street, Regent's Park, Goodge Street and Charing Cross in the middle of the bottle. The simplest way of connecting the all is Regent's Park, Oxford Circus, Warren Street, Goodge Street and Charing Cross which will result in double visiting Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square. Also it will involve double visiting some Circle line stations which may be avoided by careful planning as well.

Also, I now have two questions:
1. Are you aware of any tools which can show the frequency and the running time automatically when two stations on the same tube line are entered?
2. If I have multiple plans with similar expected time, should I choose the one spent more time on the trains, or should I choose the one spent more time transferring?

[Iain]

1. I'm not aware of one, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I did once get the electronic version of the WTTs and started building a tool to make route planning simpler, but I ran out of enthusiasm or I could have built your suggestion in. I believe Hakan (part of a Swedish team) built a statistical model many years ago

2. Ultimately the only thing that matters if you want to beat the best time is...time, but I guess any transfer has potential to go wrong such as a bus running late which would mess up the time.

In my experience a decent amount of attempts require re-routing on the fly if part of the network goes down, so it's worth thinking ahead about how you might deal with such an eventuality.

[RJSRdg]

The Working Timetables include a page listing the travel times between adjacent stations.

With a bit of work in Excel (unfortunately the data on the page doesn't copy across nicely....) it should be possible to pull together a spreadsheet that calculates the running time between stations on the same line (at least for the simpler lines like the Bakerloo, Victoria, and H&C). A frequency spreadsheet would involve a lot more work.


In terms of revisiting stations - if you go straight through on the Picc and the Charing Cross branch of the Northern, you might not want to go straight through on the Central as well (hint...). And yes, I did use the transfers you mentioned (or the reverse) in my FNC.