Quadrant Five

While the London Underground remained unchanged from the 1984 map, there were no serious problems with the Chalk Farm '84 ruleset. However, adding the Jubilee Line Extension (on which construction began some years later) would have overloaded quadrant four had it opened there with the quadrants in their original forms. Fortunately, the unamended Chalk Farm '84 rules did just about hold up while the new stations remained foetal, giving the IMCS time to devise a solution. However, were the impending quadrant overload to be permitted, all sorts of paradoxes would have arisen. For example, if a red token was placed at Shadwell or Heron Quays, all players south of the river would have been permanently toffed, which seemed unfair.

The solution, posed as part of the forward-thinking Finsbury amendments, was to put the Jubilee line between London Bridge and Stratford, the Docklands Light Railway excluding Bank and Stratford and the East London line excluding Shoreditch and Whitechapel into a new fifth quadrant. Hardly surprisingly, this solution was never accepted by CAMREC, although they became increasingly marginalised due to their tactics. See also: Fifth Quadranters.

In the Holland Park 2000 ruleset, an alternative solution was found, and quadrant five no longer exists in its original form. The idea of dividing the map into five parts rather than four did in fact form part of the solution used, but the new solution was to create a new, central 'quadrant five' (known by some purists and the Fifth Quadranters as 'the hub'). While this has caused some problems of its own, it has provoked significantly less protest from CAMREC. It appears that they are more concerned right now with logical and semantic consistency (or, more than likely, with their own in-fighting) than with actual gameplay.

Mornington Crescent scholars are still evaluating the consequences of having a quadrant that coincides with a zone. Historically, zones and quadrants have always been orthogonal to one another. In particular, there are deep implications for the studies of advanced pickerings.

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