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Old September 30th 09, 01:22 AM posted to uk.transport.london
Basil Jet Basil Jet is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Jun 2009
Posts: 400
Default W&C timetable oddities

Richard J. wrote:
Basil Jet wrote on 29
September 2009 18:37:35 ...
If you download the Bank to Waterloo timetable from the TFL site, it
has odd footnotes which serve no obvious purpose.... does anyone
know how this quirk got into the system?


Thanks for the lack of a link!


I didn't post a link because I knew the link would only work for me.

Select Getting Around / Timetables /
Tube and bus, scroll down to "Tube timetable - Tube line", select W&C,
select "Towards Bank", select from the list of stations "Waterloo"
[1], click on "View Waterloo Underground Station timetable" (what
else do they think I want to do?), and hey presto, a PDF timetable
appears. Well, a timetable for first and last trains and "about every
X to Y minutes" for the rest of the day. The footnotes apply to the
first and last trains, thus (for Waterloo to Bank):

a=only Wednesday and Friday, b=not on Wednesday and Friday, c=not on
Monday and Wednesday, d=only Monday and Wednesday

Then you realise that there are pairs of trains departing at the same
time, one with 'a' and the other with 'b', or with 'c' and 'd'.

My theory is that there is a half-minute difference in departure time
in the working timetable on certain days which leads to different
entries, but the times in the public timetable are rounded to whole
minutes. That theory would explain why on the Bank departures
timetable, one pair of early morning departures is listed in b-a
order instead of a-b. But I can't quite see how the theory fits the
THREE departures from Bank at 21:48:

21:48 e "only Monday"
21:48 f "only Wednesday"
21:48 d "not on Monday or Wednesday"


Nice theory... IIRC the W&C is the only line which uses quarter minute times
instead of half minute times.

And then of course, there's the question of why the timetable is
different at all on particular days.