tubechallenge.com

Hi everyone,

After going through this thread, I felt compelled to respond. I'm Dave, Evan's co-conspirator in this suspicious record-setting A-Z challenge. Although Evan's post seemed to give some more credibility to our record, I thought I'd add a few thoughts.

As Evan wrote, both of us are quite familiar with London and the Tube. Evan and I planned and recorded our A-Z challenge meticulously, and we are hoping to return in March to attempt a proper Tube Challenge (if anyone would like to volunteer as a timer, please help 2 Americans out )

Some of the suspicions arose after people read our rather blase write-up of the record. I'll be a good friend and pin the blame on Evan for that. I will say, however, that yes, we did "run briskly between changes." If we hadn't, we never would have caught the Baker Street-bound Metropolitan line train at Ickenham, and we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.

I believe sub-5 hours can be done, but only if you run more briskly than we did

Ah, so you didn't do Greenford then?

If I'm around next March then I'll be up for helping out during the day and stopping the watch, as long as it falls within my university's Easter holidays.

CamdenTown wrote:I'm Dave, Evan's co-conspirator in this suspicious record-setting A-Z challenge. Some of the suspicions arose after people read our rather blase write-up of the record. I'll be a good friend and pin the blame on Evan for that.

Hi Dave, welcome to the forum. I think you're right to blame Evan
It was his blase report which raised my suspicions, but now that you have both explained in a bit more detail I don't have any doubts. It's a shame that Geoff now seems to have removed the page with the Alphabet Challenge from his site.

Hopefully by the time you arrive in March 2008, we will have a new configuration with the ELL removed (subject to Guinness rulings ). Hopefully by then we will have set a new benchmark for the full network and it will be our time you are trying to beat.

Depending on dates I should be available to offer some support, so please keep us posted on your plans.

I'm pretty confident that I've come up with a route that can be done sub five hour (4h53m) without any special luck, except for generally smooth running of the system - at least according to my computer model! This involves Queensway, w/o Queensway I come up with 4h59m...

Since this is not GWR thing, I could possibly give the route to anyone interested that would not pass it on or actually use it themselves (would spoil the fun anyway, wouldn't it?)...

/HÃ¥kan

Trust you HÃ¥kan. I would in theory be up for looking at the route, but then again it's probably the same as my route, so I'd better not!

I wouldn't be surprised if they indeed are the same! Perhaps our GWR routes are very similar too...

hwolge wrote:I wouldn't be surprised if they indeed are the same! Perhaps our GWR routes are very similar too...

Quite possibly, but we never seem to end up doing our planned GWR route on the day anyway

Personally I think our routes are very different, as we have change things to the route on every different GWR to date.