Take ten people, a few tubs of Quality Street containing a few thousand brightly coloured wrapped chocolates – and you can make a Tube map out of them! Like this …
Fun
Commonest words on the Tube map
And then, to finish off our Tube-quiz-map series of posts, there’s this one – Can you name the most commonly occurring words on the London Tube map? And it’s brilliant, and is Station Master’s favourite quiz – because it really stretches our brain to the point where we’ve never actually been able to complete it within the time limit allowed!
There’s no blank Tube map to help/guide you either, out top score is 48 out of 50, and then we always have the most of “OH OF COURSE!” when we see the last few that we couldn’t get … Have a play of it, it’s really rather good.
Commonest words on the tube map
Now you have fifteen minutes …
If you think only having five minutes on the previous quiz was a little hard, and not enough time – then about about this, a fifteen minute variant over at iknowthetube.com
It’s NOT got the latest 2015 map update with the new Overground stations, but you do have more time to get as many stations as you possibly can. What’s nice about this too is that you get bonuses for getting (say) all the stations in outer-extremity zones, or a whole complete line. You get a total score at the end – separate from the number of stations you might have actually got.
This station master scored 2230 points, with 251 out of 368 stations found. Can you do better?
I know the tube
You have five minutes …
Following on from our previous post – the Buzzfeed quiz – those fiendish people then came up with another one – simply being How many stations can you type in, in under five minutes. And this Station Master’s high score is 113, can you beat that?
Going for ‘Bank‘ and ‘Oval‘ (rather than ‘Totteridge & Whetstone‘) obviously helps, and you’ll be delayed by your own mis-typing too, there’s no leniency for almost getting a station name right – you have to get it perfect. You have 5 mins! GO!!
Five minute quiz
How well do you actually know the Tube map?
It feels like there have been a lot of Tube map quizzes doing the rounds on the Internet recently. Disappointingly, no one has been sending around the link to what is possibly our most favourite ever Tube map quiz, so we thought we’d feature a few that we’ve stumbled upon recently, and finish with what we think is the most fiendish Tube map quiz ever.
First up, is Buzzfeed’s ‘How well do you know the Tube map‘, which incorrectly states that there are 401 stations on the network (there are 408) but it least it does cover the new Overground extension – which makes it tricky because do you honestly know where ‘Clapton’ is for example, when looking at a blank Tube map?
That’s what you have to do – you get presented with a blank Tube map, and a station name will pop up, can you correctly click on the blank map where that station is?
Buzzfeed Quiz
How many stations on the Tube map?
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!
Tube Life Hacks
There’s a new YouTube channel – City Hacks London – where the people behind it have made a fun video about ‘hacks’ on the Tube. They got in touch with us to ask if they could use some of our 3D maps – and so we said yes! Have a watch of this fun video full of shortcuts on the Tube …
In cahoots
Cahoots
We spotted a little fake-station-sticker fun and games on the Bakerloo Line at the weekend!
1940’s themed bar (with heavy overtones of the London Underground) Cahoots must surely be responsible for sticking these up next to the tick for Oxford Circus station – the nearest tube to cahoots.
From their website – ‘Cahoots aims to transport guests back to the war period with themed decor, a ticket booth upon your entrance, and vintage tube seating created by using old underground carriage fabrics’.
Sounds like a good place to have my birthday party this year …
Walk The Tube 2015
Ok, so after the success of last years event, we are yet again doing Walk The Tube tomorrow – Friday April 10th, with 26 people going round the whole network of 270 tube stations in one day for people’s respective charities.
Keep an eye out on Twitter for the hashtag #WalkTheTube which we’ll be using extensively throughout the day, along with Audioboo and Periscope live updates from Station Master Geoff …
New Apps for April!
The Station Master team have been busy the past few weeks and again today we have TWO new Apps to tell you about, here they are…
Glasgow Master
We got a lot of requests from our friends in Glasgow about how we were neglecting their orange coloured “Subway” and that it should get the Station Master treatment. After all, it is the third-oldest underground metro system in the world after the London Underground and Budapest Metro, opening in December 1896.
So, we packed our bags and travelled to Glasgow for a weekend to count the steps, escalators, ticket machines etc… just as we did for Station Master.
We even set a world record in the process for the fastest time to visit all 15 stations, although we’re waiting to hear back from Guinness to get official confirmation …
As the chorus of the famous “The Underground Song” goes:
“There’s Partick Cross and Cessnock, Hillhead and Merkland Street,
St George’s Cross and Govan Cross where all the people meet;
West Street, Shields Road – The train goes round and round;
You’ve never lived unless you’ve been on the Glasgow Underground.”
National Rail Master
We always had bigger ambitions when starting out on the Station Master Project, so, over the last 4 years we have systematically visited all 2500+ Railway Stations in the UK, again, collecting the extensive information required for a National Rail version of Station Master.
Finally this year we completed our goal and are able to bring you National Rail Master!
Both Glasgow Master and National Rail Master are both priced for April at £1.04 (after which they will go back up to a regular price of £14.99 each) and they are Available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch (with an Apple Watch App coming soon), Get it on Google Play for Android and from the Windows Phone Store for Windows Phone.