2018 Quiz: Results and Winners

Firstly, thank you to everyone who took part. Writing the questions is fun, but seeing how you all approach (and answer) them is even better.

As we’re aware that it always takes us a while to pull together the results, we thought we’d do something a bit different this year and show you where people succeeded and failed. Of course, we’re aware that many more of you attempt the quiz than feel brave enough to submit, so if nothing else we thought this might be a nice way to show that you’re not alone in finding it hard.

So before we look at the winners, let us take a quick look at how all the entrants – thirty in total – overall.

If you’re not sure what the questions and answers were, you can find the quiz answers here.

Question 1

Nearly everybody got the correct answer that these were things that did not happen in 2018 but should have done (1 point). 28 people got this right making it the most correctly answered question.

Question 2

The injunction that was lifted in 2018 was for the order for Siemens to provide new trains for Piccadilly line (1 point). 20 people got this correct, most of the incorrect responses centred around the cycle superhighway.

Question 3

Twenty-six people correctly answered the Emirates Air-Line or some other name that we knew to mean the cable car (1 point); the other answers were the river boats and a couple of scenic double-decker bus routes which indicate that everybody was thinking along the right lines.

Question 4

A surprising number of people gave the Gospel Oak to Barking line for this question, but the long closures there were in 2017, not 2018. Only 13 respondents got the Woolwich Ferry (1 point).

Question 5

Even fewer people answered Harlesden (1 point). With 11 people getting it correct, this was the joint second-hardest question.

Question 6

Seventeen people answered Southend Airport (1 point) here; a significant number of others suggested Gatwick Airport or Luton Airport Parkway, so a clear majority were thinking in the right direction.

Question 7

A number of people appeared to write down all the saints that they could think of which generally gained them the maximum 5 points for this question, comprising Saints James, John, Margaret, Mary and Paul. There were good arguments put forward for allowing St George but allowing him would not have made a material difference to the final results. Everybody got at least one saint: 23 people got at least 4 and 16 got all 5 with an overall average of 4.1.

Question 8

A V Roe’s Yellow Terror, the first British powered flight (1 point) was the joint second most correctly answered question after Q1 with 27 people getting there.

Question 9

Just under half of respondents — 14 people — got that the four stations all have IATA codes (1 point). Nobody got it without also getting Q8 correct.

Question 10

Some of the Australian stereotypes given as answers to this question are not suitable for publication. We got a lot of hats with corks on, people reminding us that flip-flops are known as thongs Down Under, and one answerer who wondered what Michael Portillo would wear for Great Australian Railway Journeys. Overall 20 people understood that the question referred to what would be worn on journeys around Sydney, Australia on a dry summer’s day (1 point).

Question 11

Twenty-five people correctly noted that the road sign was on Lambeth Palace Road outside St Thomas’s Hospital (1 point). Several responses included a reference to Florence Nightingale, thus demonstrating that they got the clue in the picture caption.

Question 12

To get the point here, you needed to state that the Duchesses in question were ships (1 point). Quite a few people managed this without getting that King’s Cross was actually a quay on the Isle of Arran. Don’t worry, you still got the point: this question helped prop up a number of scores toward the bottom of the table, it was the lower-mid ranking answerers who largely missed out here. 19 people got this right.

Question 13

This was a tricky one as you not only had to work out what the routes were, you also needed to get the connection which was that routes 98, 153, 312 and 521 all have electric buses running on them (1 point). Only 13 people managed to do all this.

Question 14

Nineteen people linked the hymn The King Of Love My Shepherd Is to Flanders & Swann to reach A Transport of Delight (1 point).

Question 15

Our cryptic question stumped more of you than any other question, with a number of people attempting to an answer involving the River Westbourne passing through an iron pipe under Sloane Square. Of the answers that made the home of tin — Canning Town link, only one failed to then get the hull plate from HMS Warrior (1 point). Just 10 people correctly answered this one, so congratulations if you were one of them.

Question 16

This question had the widest variety of wrong answers. Seven people got both Trevithick’s Euston Circus (1 point) and the Metropolitan Water Board railway at Kempton (1 point); a further 10 got one of the two.

Question 17

This, along with Q8 was the joint second most correctly answered question with 27 people correctly answering that it was the reflection of Hammersmith bridge in the Thames (1 point).

Question 18

We only gave the point here if you got both the 04:56 departure from Paddington Monday-Friday and the correct off-peak fare of £10.10. One respondent found an unaccompanied cash child fare on HEx for 5p which apparently has not been rescinded; we allowed this but it did not make a material difference to the results. Overall 12 people got both halves of this question correct.

Question 19

One point was available for stating that these were all signal frames that had been moved from the blue location to the black location — or at least enough to know that you understood this was the answer. A second point was available for pointing out that the whole box had moved in the case of Borough Market Junction to the National Railway Museum in York. This question cut the results table pretty cleanly in half with only one entry that scored over 20 not getting either part of this question, and no scores under 20 picked up any points here. 12 people got both points and a further 3 got one.

Question 20

Somebody noted that Huddersfield station’s female cat had been given a male partner, but admitted that the Huddersfield and Sheffield Junction Railway dates to 1845 not 1945, so while this was an admirable and notable effort we did not award any points. 20 people got that we were talking about the North Western Railway on the Island of Sodor, by correctly naming the railway, the location, Thomas the Tank Engine or indeed the Rev Awdry (1 point).

Question 21

A number of people incorrectly named Abbey Wood Crossrail station. The answer we were looking for is Feltham Marshalling Yard (1 point); we also accepted Ripple Lane Yard as a good argument was made for it. 11 people answered this correctly, making it the second-hardest question, joint with Q5.

Question 22

Four points were available here, and all but one person managed to get at least one of them. For part (a) we accepted either P13 at Stratford or P2 at North Greenwich (1 point); for part (b) we accepted either Tottenham Hale or Northumberland Park (1 point) but not Angel Road because it’s going to be closed and not receive a new platform, or Meridian Water because it is still under construction so there is no ‘logical’ platform numbering scheme; King’s Cross (1 point) has a platform 0, one respondent tried Redhill but we were looking for stations in London. Nearly everybody got that part (c) was Paddington (1 point) due to the lengthening of P12. Seven people got all 4 points and a further 12 got 3 with an overall average of 2.7.

Winners

Two entrants got full marks, two further entrants managed 29 out of 31 possible points and one managed 28.

Gold (31 points): JW and AC
Silver (29 points): EP and Timbeau
Bronze (28 points): Sir Herbert Walker Team
Honourable mention (27 points): MD

A further 10 people managed somewhere between 22 and 26, making the median score 22. The modal score was 23 with four entries; the arithmetic mean was 19.5 and the standard deviation was 7.7.

Prizes

We will be in touch with the winners in due course so that we can get some of the prizes cleared out of Pedantic’s library. We also have some nice railway poster prints to give away.

Thanks again for entering!

The LR Team