On 7th October 2017, a friend and I organised a pub-crawl style journey around as many public transport options as we could fit together.
Usually our events like that, we opened to the public, but this was semi-private because we wanted to have a decent attempt at staying on schedule: anyone could invite anyone else, but they had to take responsibility for looking after anyone they invited - we were not planning on staying behind for lames.
We started at Waterloo Station on the concourse under the big clock, and ended (of course) at Mornington Crescent.
Here is the event description that I posted on the Facebook event:
Travel around London using all of the following modes of transport: Underground, Overground, National Rail, Bus, TfL Rail as proto-Elizabeth Line, Tram, Emirates Air Line, Thames Clipper, Docklands Light Raliway. Meet at 11:00 at Waterloo Station mainline concourse, direction under the big four face analogue clock. Bring contactless Visa/MC/Amex or a loaded Oyster card. Total transport cost will be about £20. There will be two one hour stops for refreshment, one at Boxpark Croydon, and one at the O2. There is also a bar on the Thames Clipper. And whatever cheap supermarket cider you can fit into your backpack. If you are late and want to join, head to one of the refreshment stops (Boxpark or O2) to meet; or play catchup on Glympse. Don't just stand there like a lemon desperately messaging. Plan v4.0 (sans crossrail) 11:00 Meet at Waterloo directly under the four faced clock. 11:17 National Rail -> Wimbledon 11:33 11:39 Tram -> East Croydon 12:09 12:09 BOXPARK REFRESHMENTS until 13:09 13:09 Walk or tram -> West Croydon 13:20 13:20 Overground -> Canada Water 13:46 14:01 Bus -> Cutty Sark 14:29 14:29 Greenwich Foot Tunnel -> Island Gardens 14:39 14:48 DLR -> Royal Victoria via Westferry 15:12 15:22 Emirates Airline -> North Greenwich 15:40 15:40 O2 ARENA REFRESHMENTS until 16:40 16:59 Thames Clipper -> London Eye 17:59 17:59 walk on South Bank & Golden Jubilee Bridge -> Embankment 18:15 18:15 Northern line -> Mornington Crescent 18:25 18:25 LYTTLETON ARMS REFRESHMENTS & GO HOME
I made the route using a combination of my own knowledge of the transport network, and a helper program written in Haskell, WOMBLE (full git repo here).
The main goal for planning was to use each form of transport at least once. Lesser goals were to avoid backtracking, avoid using the same mechanism twice, and to make each leg be a reasonable length (eg. not just one stop on a bus, but not two hours either).
The two biggest challenges
I found in planning were:
i) Bus - there are just so many routes and bus stops in London, so I kept
adding in potential routes into WOMBLE (it never knew the entire London bus network).
ii) The Emirates Airline - contrasting with the busses, this only goes between two
points, and so to some extent the entire route ended up being planned as
"how can we get to/from the Emirates airline?".
A couple of days before the event, it turned out that TfL rail was closed and we'd have to re-route - luckily I was able to incorporate the Greenwich foot tunnel, so we didn't reduce the number of transport modes.
On the day we probably peaked at around 15-20 people at any one time. We were having enough fun to add in an extra hour long stop near the end at the Tattershall Castle, a floating pub.
Here's the TfL summary for my journey that day with the real timings. The very last stop is unfortunately truncated, and note the ticketing quirk of being charged *two* single journeys due to a delay on the Emirates Airline after already tapping in.
... and a geographical map from my friend Lynsey:
... and a group picture. Probably we maxed out somewhere like 15-20 people.
