Last weekend I’ve been on a tube challenge tour around the western end of the circle line, visiting a few stations.

Wait, you may ask, what is a tube challenge? In short it’s a challenge to visit all 270 tube stations of the London Underground network and for this challenge visiting means crossing the ticket barrier, not just standing on the platforms or passing by on a train.

The challenge comes in three different settings, where #1 is the easiest, it includes all stations you have visited before in your lifetime. For me that’s 117 stations so far, including virtually every station in Central London

The second challenge setting is only about 2017, basically resetting the playing field and trying to visit all stations within the year.  So far I have visited 68 stations on this challenge.

The hardest setting is #3 which splits the year in two halves. In the first half year you’re only allowed to count stations you’re visiting anyway while travelling through London, but dedicated tours – like this one I’ve done – are limited to the second half of the year. My count here is 59 of 270 stations.

You can find all the details in this video by Geoff Marshall on Youtube: Tube Map Challenge 2017.

I even created a small webapp to help me keep track of stations and count them: station-counter.

Back to last week’s tour: I’ve travelled west on the Piccadilly line to visit a few stations I’ve missed earlier and then switched to the Circle line  to complete both branches west of Paddington for challenge #1, ending at Hammersmith. Afterwards I made a quick detour to also visit Farringdon, a local station I had to good reason not to visit earlier.