Cool! How did you suss out the optimal route, by hand and a lot of timetables, or is there some sort of spreadsheet/program?
well, I spent weeks studying the timetables and making sample schedules to follow, until I came up with one that had the shortest amount of time from point A to point Z. Rockaway Park is the absolute place you HAVE to start, #1 because it is the farthest station from any transfer point and #2 because you can be royally screwed at any hour waiting for not only the Rockaway Park shuttle, but both branches of the A, especially if you have to backtrack. I found an optimal starting time of 1:51AM which had less than 5 minute transfers each at Broad Channel for the A to Far Rock, the A back to Rock Blvd, the Lefferts shuttle, the return Leffert Shuttle, and the A local to 207, which gets you to the other end at 4:44AM. Not only does it knock out all of the Rockaways up front, but it kills off almost the entire late night period, which has the worst headways, without any long waits that eat up time. Of course, in reality nothing EVER goes as planned, and with delays and surprise reroutes (and the entire 7 line from Times Square to Queensboro Plaza was closed due to a fire in the east river tunnel at just the time I was going to ride it) there is a lot of improvising that needs to be done on the fly, and you have to be very careful not to miss any stations if you change your route in the middle of the trip. There was another team who attempted to break the record back in 2003, and they wrote a spreadsheet macro to try to find an optimal route. Of course, computers are stupid and the program didn’t work for shit, since it didn’t take into account strategy, and they ended up taking 32 hours to complete the trip. You HAVE to have good instinct to survive. It’s not just a method of finding the route, but handling being up for 24+ hours, with very limited food and bathroom options.
When my record was broken last December (before I even had the chance to be published in a print edition), it was done by a team of two people who sought out lots of media attention, and they used the clever idea of doing it during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so that they’d have weekday schedules, but almost nobody would be commuting to and from work, so there weren’t rush hour delays. I believe they clocked in at around 22 hours, 10 minutes. At first, I started working on a new plan so I could reclaim the record, but I soon realized I should just get on with my life.
Speaking of crazy records, I have a couple of friends who two summers ago rode the entire Long Island Railroad … it took them about 30 hours (although their biggest wait was about 2 and a half hours at the end was for the first Belmont Park shuttle of the day) and cost each contestant $106 in fares.
None of this is unusual even to a Philadelphian. If I had to go from the airport area in Philly (Southwest Philly) to Temple University in North Philly, I’d had to leave an hour and some misc. time for walking. So that’d be 1 hour and 15 mins… And that was just two trains. There just wasn’t an express option.
Philly trains cover big areas, too, but what I outlined above is all within the city limits and covers less than the avg distance travelled. Coming from the Philly burbs, which would be equivalent to coming from out of Manhattan to Manhattan, would be very similar. Hour…1.25 hours…almost 1.5…all would be normal.