Fastest way from Haverhill to Central London (King's Cross)?

Question

Let's say I want to get from the southwest corner of Suffolk (say, Haverhill) to Central London (say, King's Cross) and I have a car. I certainly don't want to drive in Central London not to mention the challenges of parking there so I want to drop off the car somewhere en route and switch to train / tube.

What's the fastest route on a weekday and on a weekend? I feel the two will vastly differ because of traffic. Like, on a weekend it might be reasonable to drive to the tube (maybe Leytonstone or as far as Mile End or even further?) but on weekdays one might want to switch to the train somewhere far, far out (Audley End? Stansted airport? perhaps Witham?).

How would you even search for something like this? Currently I am looking at Google Maps driving time + Google Maps transit time with a quick look on Parkopedia whether there's parking nearby.

Answer 1

I can't find a better search engine but I did find a seemingly very good and somewhat unconventional solution: start by slightly going north namely to Cambridge North station. From there, Great Northern goes to King's Cross straight and fast (only stop is Cambridge). Otherwise, it seems the area in general is served by Greater Anglia which is slower because it stops more often and also it terminates at Liverpool Street which is nowhere near as central.

Train times seem to be 1:02-1:04 and driving time seems to be 35 minutes. Since driving to King's Cross even on empty roads (at 2am) is given as 1:25 from my starting point -- thus this combined solution is only ten minutes longer and the roads this uses are less severely hit by peak traffic based on what Google tells me.

There's a parking lot with 450 car spaces at the station.

On the weekend, going to the Cambridge station itself seems to be a better alternative as there are few trains servicing Cambridge North and the driving time into Cambridge is a similar 35 minutes if there's little traffic.

Answer 2

Both on the weekend and the week, but outside of rush hours, I would drive to Walthamstow, walk to the Tube station and take that to central London.

Get to the M11, and take it to the North Circular. This is motorway standard all the way, and ends with an interchange onto the North Circular. It is quite resistant to the load of London traffic so is one of the best approaches.

Head west on the North Circular, and take the first exit. At this point you are basically in Walthamstow, and the difficult bit of the trip is to find a parking spot in a residential area that does not have restrictions. This probably needs a little driving about, it has been a while since I was there so cannot give advice.

Walk to the tube station. It is the start of the Victoria line, and usually has a train waiting so you can get on with a choice of seats. This stops at Kings Cross after about 25 minutes.