Buses, Trains and Timetable booklets!

Yesterday (14/02/17) I went out to London and met up with +James Finn to go round on some trains and buses. He had a very good plan (almost as precise as mine!) and we started the day on the c2c to Fenchurch Street. Just a normal ride into London, but afterwards it got veeeeeerrrrrryyyyyyyyy sssssssssssllllllllllllllooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Here's a tip: Don't get the 15 through London. It took about 40 minutes just to get from Tower Hill to Charing Cross.

With LT258 out of the way, time to get to the faster stuff. Namely, the Bakerloo line. The '72 stock are actually really nice, but clearly a bit neglected. The map was months out of date! Then it was on to the really good stuff. I picked up 2 timetable booklets (Explained in another post) and then it was time for Another trip on the 11:36 parliamentary out of Paddington!

I walked through both carriages and counted the number of people and saw how many exited/entered at each station, to create this list of people on the train, not including us:

Paddington Board: 5

Paddington - South Ruislip: 5

South Ruislip Board: 0
South Ruislip Leave: 0
South Ruislip - West Ruislip: 5
West Ruislip Leave: 5

Whole Journey (Paddington - West Ruislip): 5

So not all that busy, but not totally desolate! It was then time to get the Central Line (after picking up 3 night tube maps from West Ruislip!) to Greenford to check out the 'inclinator' and then on to Holborn. 'DING!' with a second hot chocolate and then we were off again, this time on SEe24 to London Bridge.

This was where we took our lives into our own hands... We caught a Southern, yes, Southern service to East Croydon. It was (amazingly) bang on time, but I bet it didn't stay like that all the way to Uckfield!

East Croydon was the first stop on the train and it was the place we were going to get off at for a while. The Tramlink is great, so we decided to go on a 4 to Church Street then a Variobahn on the 2 back round to East Croydon. That left us just enough time to run down to Platform 1, ready for the Thameslink service towards Bedford. That also left us just enough time to listen to a platform alteration announcement, then swerve in between the coffee shops to Platform 2, ready for the Thameslink service towards Bedford. Unfortunately, a 377 pulled in, but we were on a tight schedule, so we hopped on for one long stop to London Blackfriars. It did me some good to get back in London and back under ground on the tube, after a few weeks without it, especially a speedy Victoria Line ride to Vauxhall after the Circle took us round to Victoria! 'Lovely WVL' 107 took us round to Clapham Junction on the 87 towards Wandsworth, where there was the chance of another timetable booklet...

'DING!' A third hot chocolate was bought here, but what I was really after was a South West Trains timetable booklet. Unfortunately, it wasn't on display and there were no people to ask, but we made our train to Willesden! The tight, 3-minute connection there was easily made, so we were running on time when we got to Euston. Coming off the D/C line, we went underground again, but this time it wasn't such a pleasant experience. The Northern Line carriage easily got to a crowding level of 9 and I'm glad we opted to get the train direct to Bank instead of catching the Charing Cross branch and hopping on the Central Line! A quick trundle to Monument was in order, to go one final underground stop of the day, ending up at Tower Hill. This is where something really exciting happened. After a short walk to Fenchurch Street, we boarded the 17:46 to Leigh-on-Sea. All normal, just a 357. Then, a 357 pulled out of the station and revealed... 387306! I was ecstatic! The first c2c 387 I've ever seen! It was on the 17:43 to Shoeburyness and I ran and ran to grab over 20 photos of it standing there. I couldn't get on it, but I was so pleased with just seeing it.

So that was the day, all in all a rather good one I think!
Hope you enjoyed this post,
Jezza