please empty your brain below
Although there are evidently some who do!
what's next? ... how about a competition for who's got the biggest potholes, we've got some glorious ones in N8-N10
Reading this series of posts has encouraged me to get out on a bus a bit more. The journey between Crouch Hill and Hampstead on a sunny Sunday afternoon is quite pretty.
Top deck, front seats. The only way to ride.
My response to Malcolm above would be that although they may not be two destinations you'd want to go between in themselves, each is a major bus hub for its area so it makes good sense for them to be linked together by bus too - essentially it opens up most of the areas either side of the bridge to most areas on the other side. Or would, if the connections were more frequent, cheaper and ideally integrated on some sort of EstuaryRider ticket of the kind deregulation has more or less ruled out…
DG Great post, I've spent too long now looking at maps of this area for potential walks Mardyke? Riverside? The bus ride across the bridge sounds great, right up my (and undoubtedly lots lots of others here) street. Keep up the excellent work.
Because I really am that sad I've been collecting statistics on your trip. Unsurprisingly, given that most of the route was a 50mph clearway, this was one of the fastest legs, at an average of 19mph, bringing the average speed for the whole circuit up to just over 13mph. (161 miles in 12 hours 16 minutes - although as DG was usually only timing to the nearest five minutes that could be out by anything up to an hour either way)
The fastest leg of all was route 84, which did three miles in eight minutes - an average of 22mph, although on such a short hop the error bars will be quite big. This was also the oldest bus, with a 51 reg (late 2001)
Longest leg was the first, the 492 - 13 miles in just over an hour. The shortest was the two mile hop on route 179. This also tied with the 275 for the newest bus (both 63 reg, or late 2013) The average age of the buses was just over seven years (i.e a 56 reg). (this average does not include the 216, as its registration plate was not visible in the photo)
Surisingly for such a suburban, or even rural, itinerary the majority of the buses (thirteen out of 25) were double deckers, but as they tended to be on the shorter legs they contributed only 43% of the intinerary (by time and distance).
The route numbers summed to 5797, including 102 from the "letter" routes. The digit "5" appeared only once.
Thirteen buses crossed the GLA boundary, five of them more than once: there were 22 crossings altogether. Ten buses were entirely within the GLA area, the final two being the only ones entirely outside it.
And thanks for your reminder on the sidebar about the LT Depot Open Weekend this Sat and Sunday.
If you or anyone else wants to ride the X81 and almost guarantee to get stuck on the bridge then watch out for the Ensignbus running day in December each year. RTs, Routemasters and other buses galore to take you to Kent *Gravesend) and Essex (Brentwood and Grays) with plenty of buses on the Dartford Crossing.
And thanks for the stats boost on Flickr! ;-)
Ending up at Bluewater must be something of an anticlimax after such a tour! (Though: Lakeside would've been even more so - apart from the lack of signposting to the bus station, or good signposting to Chafford Hundred station, it is something of a pedestrian's nightmare, straight out of JD Ballard - getting to Ikea involves taking your life in your hands a few times too...)
This is what I got:
25-108-75-X26-65-607-94
Oxford Circus – Stratford – Lewisham – Croydon – Kingston – Ealing Broadway
– Shepherd’s Bush – Oxford Circus
(I'm sure there's a better option)
I'm not sure that a trip that doesn't go any further north than Stratford could quite qualify as "Round London". Your mileage may vary.
Clearly DG didn't do the trip in one go. (Or if he did, where are the night time pictures?). But I rather enjoyed the implication of time passing behind the scenes, as it were, and the whole thing is tidily joined up into one narrative.
"Round London" could be done on one bus if you don't define a radius - for instance route RV1 crosses over itself. How about "outside Zone 1"?
For the C-charge zone, seven buses: Vauxhall,196, Elephant, 188, Tooley Street, 42/78, Aldgate, 67, Shoreditch, 394, Angel, 205, Edgware Road, 36/436 back to Vauxhall. (You can omit the 67 and 394 if you are not too purist)
If you want the edge of Zone 1, after Edgware Road take the 27 to High St Ken, C1 to South Ken and the 360 back to Vauxhall.
I was very lucky with the X26 connection at Heathrow - just a few minutes. I had missed the A10 fast bus at Uxbridge because the preceding U1 from Ruislip ran late and was packed full of people! If the X26 connection goes wrong then it's 30 mins wait or three buses to get from Heathrow to Croydon. From memory my trip took about 10 hours - 0800 to 1800.
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