The other day we had the fun of TubeWhacking which sucked a fair few minutes out of Station Masters day when we should be hard at work.  Today, we have something even better which has totally distracted us this morning, and it’s been totally worth it for the fun involved.  Introducing … Mini Metro!

Create Your Own Metro System!

No, not the car – but a game where you build and develop your own subway system, you get to draw lines, connect stations, build tunnels under rivers and add carriages to the trains on your line.

All the time your metro system grows – as do the number of people travelling on it, and the aim of the game is to go as long as you can with getting a ‘Station Overcrowded!’ message which is when you lose.

We’ve played it for over an hour solid this morning, and our passenger high score number was 341.

Beware. It’s terribly addictive, and yet so much fun! Which is why we recommend you go and play it immediately!

You can tweet the developer here too for feedback.

This is the best tube related thing we’ve seen in ages. We love this site.

The classic St. Johns’ Wood is the only station not to contain any of the letters from the word ‘Mackerel’ is a long-term established tube fact, as (was recently discovered) that Woodford is the only station not to contain any letters from the word ‘Stickleback’.

We mentioned this a while ago with some other variants we know, but now there’s a site… this simple beautiful site by Ben Green which let’s you ‘Whack’ your own words to see which tube station may be the only only not to contain those letters.

TubeWhacking

And it’s not just the London Tube, but it works for the Paris Metro, German U-Bahn, and even has a ‘Wombling’ option for London, to include Overground stations too.  Genius!

Seems like there’s been a spate of ‘Fake Signs’ doing the round on the tube again, with various people tweeting us links to fake signs that people have been sticking up in carriages on tubes.

The Poke has the best summary webpage that we can find with all the current variants, including the rather excellent ‘snake charmer’ variant.

But what we like best are the ones on the Central Line that go over the line diagram maps replacing either station names, or mixing up the red line in some other awkward fashion (There’s even a Facebook Group specifically for them!).

But then something stirred in our memories and we dug through the extensive Station Master archive of tube photos, and .. yes!

We knew they were there somewhere, and here they are – the first time (we think!) that rogue stickers first appeared on the tube, as these from the Northern Line date back to 2003. The space-invaders one is our favourite.