Station Master Geoff pops up on a new Sky 1 quiz show tonight, The Fanatics as he pitches his Underground knowledge against two other fanatical contestants – a Doctor Who devotee and a Boxing aficionado.
It’s on tonight at 8pm, and you’ll have to watch it to see who wins …
Geoff the Fanatic
Merry Christmas 2014, from Station Master. We quite like the design on the front of the card of the official TfL Christmas card …
Roundel Stars
Matt Brown from the Londonist website has released this today – a fun Medieval Tube map, from a time ‘Utterly untroubled by signal failures; and a time when you might be imprisoned for swiping an Oyster‘
Medieval Tube Map
Now this just looks fabulous! It’s the London Underground Treasure Hunt. It’s an offer on lastminute.com with the blurb saying:
“Challenge yourself and a friend to the exciting London Underground Treasure Hunt for Two. Beneath the bustling city of London you can try out your detective skills with this fun and challenging experience. You will work together to crack the puzzles and find the hidden treasure within 2 hours to be victorious.”
An evening on the tube, going round participating in a treasure hunt, which is clearly London Underground themed … we’ve booked tickets for next month, and will report back on our experience!
Treasure Hunt
It’s rush hour. There are loads of people on the train, and you really want a seat when you get on that train. But you’ve been told to let people off the train first – and when that seldom happens – there is a pattern that forms that commuters make.
EVERYONE hogs around the door leaving a thin channel ‘one person wide’ to let people off the train, in single file – like this:
Letting people off of a train
But there is a better way. What if, everyone gave MORE space to people getting off of the train – say, enough to let more than one person off at a time. People would get off the train faster, and those waiting to get on would then be able to board sooner.
A better way of letting people off the train
It’s never going to happen obviously, because you’ve still got the complete arseholes that push their way onto a train immediately without waiting for others to get off first, so if we can’t even master that basic rule, we’re never going to be able to get to grips with something more advanced like this.
(Part inspired by Brendan Neslon – How to get a seat on an Overground train)
Jay Foreman’s all stations tube song is now somewhat legendary already, but yesterday we heard from a lovely chap, Joseph Moëd, who pointed us in the direction of a similar thing he’d done a year before, but featuring just the stations of Zone 1…
(Joseph has since moved to Toronto in Canada, where he’s made a similar video for their subway system there…)
Another video we stumbled just recently but from the past – a posh dinner party on board a tube train? Yeah … that’s been done as these people show from a few years back on board a Jubilee Line train.
It’s amazing what a little Googling can do for you! After we dug out the old (15 years!) Evening Standard article from yesterday about the original ‘Beat the tube’ runners, it appears that that event is still taking place – and we think with maybe some of the same people?
The run from South Kensington to Fulham Broadway took place back in May of this year – and yes, the Evening Standard covered it!
Fulham run
The internet got very excited yesterday when a viral video doing the rounds showed a man getting off a Circle Line train at Mansion House and running along the streets to get back on the same train at Cannon Street.
We saw it, but it didn’t stop loads of people tweeting us telling us about it.
The thing is – it’s been done before, and we knew we had pre-internet evidence of it too tucked away in a storage box – so last night we dug it out and scanned it in – an instance of this happening fifteen years ago in 1999, and then a repeat performance a year later in 2000, as they attempted to make it an annual event. The Evening Standard newspaper covered it both years.
(Click on the images for full size scans of the Evening Standard newspaper article)
1999 Event
The feat here though was even harder – you had to jump off the back of a District Line train at South Kensington, and then run the the 2.5 km down the Fulham Road to get back on the same train at Fulham Broadway station. And what’s more, they had no running gear – they did it in business shirts & ties.
2000 Event
Would this still be possible today? We did some quick calculations. The TfL journey planner suggests a train takes 11 minutes to travel this – although as we all know Earl’s Court (a bit like Edgware Road) is a bit of a Bermuda Triangle of the tube where anything can happen and trains can get held, so maybe you’d get a bit of extra time? Although Fulham Broadway has now dramatically changed with a new entrance that involves you running through a shopping centre and would add at least half a minute to your time.
Fast runners though can easily do a kilometre in 4 minutes, meaning that 2.5km should be doable in 10 minutes .. so yes! It’s still possible.
Perhaps the chaps in the YouTube video between Mansion House and Cannon Street would like to try this as well? Get in touch ..
Here’s something super geeky (and suited for a pub quiz perhaps?) that we only worked out the other day – which Tube Line has got 22 stations in a row that all contain the same letter?
It’s the Metropolitan Line, which if you follow from Amersham all the way down to Liverpool Street you’ll notice has got the letter R in all of the station names.
In fact, if you look at all 34 stations on the line, there are only five stations that don’t contain the letter ‘R‘ at all!
We can’t see any other occurrences on the tube map where this happens – unless you know different…
Click on the image to see the WHOLE of the Metropolitan Line, and all of the R’s highlighted.
Metropolitan R’s