My Zone 1 Attempt

Ever since I visited London with my father back in the late sixties I’ve been fascinated by the London Underground. Back then I heard rumours about visiting all stations in one day. Having a large tube map on my bedroom wall I spent endless hours fantasizing about doing it myself one day. However, back in the late seventies and early eighties when I was no longer controlled by my parents, I realized that it could probably not be done without an immense research effort - collecting time tables and maps on location in London. So for a couple of decades the dream stayed a dream.

A few months ago, everything changed. A new colleague entered my office and saw the tube map (ca 1985 edition) on my wall. A couple of days later he came around with a book – Tunnel Vision by Keith Lowe (2001) – about a young man who gets tricked into visiting the 267 stations in the Underground on the day before his wedding. I haven’t yet read the book, but I immediately looked in the author’s note, and found out that it was inspired by Mr Robin Robinson’s successful attempt in March 2000.

Inspired by this I started browsing the web. I soon came upon Geoff Marshall who seems to be the present record holder. On his site I also found a page about the Zone 1 Challenge. This sounded great fun. However, going to London for three hours of Underground travel seemed a bit too expensive. That was my mindset until the beginning of February when another couple of my colleagues went to London for a weekend. This made me check air fares. Then I found out Ryan Air had single trip tickets for £0.68. There were two daily flights from Sturup, Malmö, Sweden to Stansted. The morning flight leaving 10:20a local time, arriving at Stansted at 11:10a. The return flight departed from Stansted 7.20p. I figured that there would be time for a Zone 1 challenge - just. I suggested this to a few of my colleagues and surprisingly they found it interesting. So we became a group of four - myself, Johan, Patrick and Kristoffer – travelling to London on the 16th of February 2005.

Of course, we wanted to arrive well prepared, so I went about and wrote a computer program to find the best possible route – a challenge in itself – but it worked very well producing our route with the following characteristics:

Picture evidence here...

There were a couple of glitches under way. Johan (our photographer) managed to catch a train that the rest of us missed. During this minor crisis Kristoffer decided to do sightseeing of London instead of completing the attempt. He had never been to London before and names like Oxford Circus finally got to him. However, a few connections later I and Patrick caught up with Johan and we finished together.

Afterwards we managed to squeeze in a visit to London Transport museum where I bought the latest official tube map (now on my office wall). We also reunited with Kristoffer here, who had strolled the tourist area for the last hour or so...

Not realizing that there was no Stansted Express at 5:15p (they run every 15 minutes, but only until 5pm), we arrived 15 minutes after plan, with just 3 (!) minutes to spare, at Ryan Air’s check-in counter.

All in all we had a great day. And I’m beginning to think BIG now… But first I’ll go to London for the 2005 Zone 1 Challenge.