New Tube map

So with a new Tube map in town, a Buzzfeed game has emerged with a blank map that tests your knowledge of where stations are on the Tube map (Not an original idea, this one has been around for much longer).

Of course ‘Tube map’ is a term that should be used lightly, as it’s no longer a Tube map – but a map of TfL services, so we should probably be calling it the ‘TfL Map’ instead.

But in that game they say that there are 401 stations – a figure that we disagree with as when the map came out last week, we had a count up ourself and had a different figure.

So we’ve counted them all up again this morning, and have come up with the same different figure – 408 in total – and so we’re going with that as the total number of stations on the TfL Map.

Here’s the breakdown:

Stations that are ‘pure’ and only have one mode

Tube – 243, Overground – 85, DLR – 41, TfL Rail – 10 

Then there are the stations that are ‘mixed’ – i.e. once though the barriers you have a choice

Tube + Overground : 23
(e.g. Richmond branch, Bakerloo up to Harrow and Wealdstone)

Tube + DLR : 3
(Bank, Canning Town, West Ham)

Tube+DLR+Overground+TfL Rail : 1
(Stratford)

Tube+TfL Rail+Overground : 1
(Liverpool Street)

TfL Rail + Overground : 1
(Romford)

And that’s 408 in total.

(Note – To determine what is a station, we go by the gateline/ticket barriers at that station. So on the map Paddington is shown once, but is actually two stations.  Hammersmith is also two separate stations. Shepherd’s Bush also has two separate gatelines for the Overground and Tube, and so it’s two separate stations, as is West Hampstead.  Shadwell is also separate stations – one for Overground, one for DLR.)

So back to our original thought – only 270 stations on the map are actually Tube stations – out of 408 now, is two thirds – 66.1% of the map. The rest is non-Tube.

Also – we didn’t include the two Cable Car ‘stations’. We can tell you’re gutted about that.

Incidentally – The best Tube map quiz that we’ve ever encountered is the still this fiendishly difficult one over at Sporcle – where you have to identify the 50 most popular words on the Tube map in just ten minutes, and we here at Station Master have never been able to get all 50!