please empty your brain below

Your dedication in satisfying your own and your readers' curiosity is much appreciated. However, in this instance it is highly unlikely that I will follow in your trail.
Map link for those who'd like to see the route during the daytime: tfl.gov.uk/bus/route/n20/?=inbound

dg writes: (also first link in post)
Thank you as ever, DG, for putting the shift in so none of us need to!
I enjoy taking "night buses" on June mornings. The last N20 leaves at 0540, so you can do the whole journey in daylight from about mid-April to August.
Regarding running to time I took the 213/N213 on New Year's Eve/Day. The 213 proudly announced on the day service information board that its frequency would increase from every half hour to once every twenty minutes.

However, TfL switched real time tracking off so all I could do was watch the last day bus head into Sutton depot and make an educated guess as to the clockface of the night buses.

Needless to say we ended up waiting over half an hour (thanks TfL, not). The bus itself was all but full, but there were two seats together midway on the upper deck which were grateful for our company. However, there was also a very jolly and lively atmosphere for the whole journey unlike any experienced on a London bus before.
Meanwhile the Edgware branch of the Northern line gets the N5, another numerically disassociated nightbus route.
I believe that when LRT renumbered it from N1, the N20 was chosen because of the postcode it served, rather than it being coincidence, LRT wanted the N1 identity for the current route which shadows the daytime 1, as part of a wider policy of matching day and night routes as much as possible.
In my view the diversion via Finchley Central cannot be explained by "we need to tick off all the northern line stations, since the next 3 stations are all omitted.

Also if all 8 waits-for-time could have been avoided by a non-early start, then they must have amounted to no more than 5 minutes in total - not too bad really, though I do agree that such waits are nonetheless irritating to those on board.

An entertaining post nonetheless.
Nice of you to travel the N20 the Night Bus that didn't exist when I grew up in Highgate. I left for the US in 1974. Back then the last Northern Line train left the West End not much after midnight and the Night Bus didn't run weekends or indeed at all due to staff shortages. No wonder minicabs proliferated in the 70's. No Night Tube option then.

Possibly these days there is less reason for all residential side streets to be jam packed with private cars if public transport has improved.
Perhaps the N5 is numbered because it shadows the A5 road.
I rode the N26 nightbus for the first time the other day, coming home from an evening shift. I have also used the N38 back in 2008.
While the N20 doesn't stop directly outside West Finchley, Woodside Park or Totteridge, it goes within easy walking distance of all three. However with Finchley Central, if the bus went straight up the A1000, it would be over a mile to the station at the closest point so a diversion is considered necessary.
The N5 and N20 were a great innovation when they came in, as the obsession with night routes paralleling day routes or even just being 24 hour routes forgets that they are covering journeys made by the tube and National Rail as well.

Timbo, I hadn't considered that, I guess it's a possibility.

The N5 does a better job of replicating the Edgware branch than the N20 the High Barnet branch, passing by ALL the stations except Brent Cross, which it used to, but I guess the number of people benefiting was heavily outweighed by the extra journey time imposed on far more people!
When I first moved to London in 2008, the N20 was one of two useful nightbuses home (the N41 being the other) - and I remember it being very busy. Night tube certainly seems to have changed that!
Moogal - only on Friday and Saturday night though!










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