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Tomorrow I shall do Zone 1 again. And tomorrow, the record shall become mine!

But, being Wednesday, the D&C lines will experience severe delays, as well as the Bakerloo and Northern lines.

More at about 3pm tomorrow.

Good luck then!

HÃ¥kan

Good luck. You'll need it

By the way, I broke the Paddington-Finchley Road challenge record this evening, with a time of 14mins02secs

All these new attempts and records... Tubeguru needs to update the site!

Thanks for the luck, gentlemen.

CrunchySaviour wrote:All these new attempts and records... Tubeguru needs to update the site!

Thanks for the luck, gentlemen.

Yes, tubeguru does. I've been really busy recently.

Now I have to go through all these posts and find out who's done what.

Anthony - could you summarise exactly what YOU'VE done because you're the one that keeps re-trying everything all the time.

The others should be easier to find.

Tubeguru, here's a summary of what I've done. All is "Zone 1" stuff.

Attempt 1: Wednesday, February 23, 2005.
Theoretical 2hr 57m route
Actual time: 3h 0m 41s
The Metropolitan line was completely broken, so I had to wait a long while for a Circle line train at Aldgate.
I was 6 minutes ahead of schedule for the first 40 minutes of the attempt but then it all went wrong.
The south/westbound platform at Bayswater was closed! I had to take a nortbound train to Paddington and double back there. That added another 7 minutess to the journey.

Attempt 2: Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005
Theoretical 2h 57m route
Actual time 2h 59m 5s
This time I had 7 excellent changes in a row, a great Aldgate/East change, and there were few delays.
However, something had to go wrong, so it did. The District line train I was on to Earls Court decided to stop for 10 whole minutes in the tunnel. It could have been amazing.

Attempt 3: Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Theoretical 2h 57m route
Did not complete challenge. D&C too severely delayed.
Started the challenge, eventually changed to an eastbound D&C train and waited for it to slowly edge its way between two stations. It took 12 minutes, during which the driver passed the time by performing 4 emergency stops.
Restarted the challenge after becoming fed up with these damned emergency stops, and after waiting at a platform for 5 minutes on a similar D&C train, gave up and went home.

Attempt 4: Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Theoretical 2h57m route
Did not complete challenge. Lost Oyster card.

This time, the challenge went well for an hour, excepting a long wait at a green signal on a Bakerloo trian at a platform. Why? I poked my head out of the train in exasperation to see what was going on, and saw the driver walk out of the little staff room with a cup of tea and saunter onto the train! He wasted a good two minutes there, not to mention the extra 2 minutes that the train sat at the red signal for.

Eventually got to Aldgate and ran to Aldgate East. May have missed a Hammersmith train by 30sec because the next train, 5 minutes later, was a Wimbledon one, which I got on thinking "I'll get a Circle from Tower Hill then". Went to Tower Hill, first 3 trains listed were District trains. Bugger. Got on first one back to Aldgate East and ran like hell across tot he other platform to catch a waiting Hammersmith train! Yes! I was 11 minutes behind by then but it didn't matter.

I checked my pockets. Something was missing. Disaster. No Oyster card.
Did it fall out at Aldgate East during the vigorous run? Did someone steal it from my gaping pocket (I won't be that stupid again) or indeed, did someone pick it up from the floor and think "I'll have that!"?

Either way, it's gone. I abandoned the challenge (without tickes it's nigh on impossible), backtracked to Aldgate and Aldgate East to look for the bloody thing. I didn't find it. I asked around but they couldn't find it. I went home thanks to the guys at Aldgate East letting me onto the platforms to look for it, and I could then catch a train "for free" (despite having paid the bastards a full £67 for a month's travel just last week) and get back to Turnpike Lane, where the barriers were open.

I couldn't buy a ticket because the only items I had on my person were a bunch of keys, a dust mask, a pen, a pencil, my challenge timetable, and a Way Out tube map. I was conserving weight, see.

Now I have to pay them another £5 for a new student photocard, and I have to get a new National Express student card, since that was int he Oyster wallet with the Oyster card (I won't be that stupid again either).

Total utter disaster.

Bloody hell ... *sigh*

I may just copy and paste all that and put "Anthony takes up the story ..."

You don't have to post all the Attempt 4 stuff... you could summarise it like the other attempts, or just say "halfway through the attempt, Anthony lost his Oyster card and was forced to abandon"!

Or just have one small paragraph that says:

Anthony has made X attempts, his times (in descending chronological order), are W, Y and Z. His best (W) was on the dd/mm/yy.

Simple!

Says he with pages and pages of stuff about his attempts! This is one record that I will not let you have, Geoff.