please empty your brain below

If you're not concerned about letters, 16 stations can be had crossing between opposite sides of the Circle line: NHG - Bond Street - Green Park - Piccadilly Circus - Oxford Circus - Warren Street - Leicester Square - Holborn - Liverpool Street. For extra fun NHG - Green Park all include an 'e'.
If only you had done this on speak like a pirate day.
That's grrrrrrrreat.
Silly Rs...
Need to watch out for Oyster maximum times!
All the stations on both routes between Kings Cross and Finsbury Park, and those on the Northern City Line (which used to be part of the Tube) also include an R. But there is no way of including them without ending up back at Kings Cross again. (Crossrail would provide a hyperleap from Moorgate to Tottenham Court Road though)
@Andrew

That's what paper travel cards are for. But in fact D G did it in 117 minutes, comfortably inside the 160 allowed for a ten zone weekday journey (9 to 1 to 2)
Love it!
Yep, I genuinely looked up Mornington Crescent...a great pity that you missed this minor deviation.
Utterly pointless. Utterly trivial.

Mysteriously fascinating.

Thanks.
Very nice, but how does DG get time to write and publish a post as deep as this AND go to work?
@B

Unfortunately you can't get to Mornington Crescent without going through Euston or Camden Town.

@PPPS
Only if you count Crossrail as part of the Underground
We will have to wait until Crossrail (alternative name eschewed) opens to see whether "those who lay down the rules" include it. But as the DLR (and, I presume, Overground and Tramlink) are excluded, I suspect that "they" will rule it out.

Great fun.
Timbo indicates that the full journey which DG did was achieved in the Oyster allowed time. So it was, but I doubt if he could have been sure of that before he set out. So if I was doing it, being a risk-averse person, I would buy the paper travelcard. While it still exists.
I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but what's to stop the intrepid traveller from picking up Charing Cross as well, by slipping it between Westminster and Waterloo?
@Malcolm,

because you can't get to Charing Cross from either Westminster or Waterloo without going through Embankment
I'm not sure about DG's P.P.S. about including the DLR. It only works because Custom House is "for ExCeL". I suppose that is the proper name as it appears on maps.
One can easily find that PaRks, Roads, StReets and places in the NoRth have all played a part. The Met more often than not take stops at these kind of places, so it's the R's who don't bear those words that make the Metroland so special.

On a side note, the Watford extension will lengthen this chain by 1 station.

dg writes: Agreed, and amended, thanks.
Fabulous. Especially the throwaway snippet about St Johns Wood.
Regarding stations starting with 'W'...

Once upon a time you could get a train with a licensed bar from Waterloo to Portsmouth.

Regulars had a line of glasses paid for and took a drink every time a station starting with 'W' was passed.

One has now gone, but originally Walton-on-Thames, Weybridge, West Weybridge (now Byfleet & New Haw), West Byfleet, Woking and Worpleston was likely to cause considerable slurring.
(slightly tangential)

Something I noticed: Cyprus is the only station on the Tube map that does not share any of its letters with the word "noodle".
If you included the Overground, you could get 42 (Canada Water to Wandsworth Road) [or 41 on Canada Water to Forest Hill branch]
@Mike D
You missed three - Waterloo itself, Wimbledon, and Witley. But the sequence of six out of seven between Walton and Worplesden (interrupted only by Hersham) must have been quite a challenge.
Some people really have nothing better to do?!
A totally random bit of trivia my memory suddenly dredged up: the main line from Waterloo as far as Woking contains every letter except Z.

(With J, Q, V and X taken care of by the first three stations I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true of some of the other lines out of Waterloo.)
Well known, but wrong that St John’s Wood is unique in this respect. A correspondent to Private Eye has pointed out that Woodford and South Woodford share this distinction.

dg writes: Both Woodford and South Woodford share the letter 'r' with the word mackerel.










TridentScan | Privacy Policy