- Its one end of the London Underground Central Line, its the furthest North-East corner of that network and only one of two terminus stations for the Tube which lie outside of London itself.
- There is a heritage train group who run between Epping and Ongar along a closed section of the Central line, who have become best known in railway circles for letting a Porno Movie get filmed aboard one of their trains in recent times.
- Our friends Paul and Alice live in Epping.
I'd met Paul through Kevin, who I knew through railway circles in NZ. The three of us spent a good weekend in Cologne, Germany together chasing trains (see here), and Sasha and I subsequently caught up with Paul and his wife Alice quite a few times either in Germany or the UK. They'd often mentioned we were welcome to stay at their house on any future trip to London - but with Epping technically not being London (a bit like how Rolleston is not Christchurch, but on a more extreme scale) for a fleeting visit to do things in central London it would be a bit difficult to work into our plans timings-wise because of the travel times and distance, as it would mean no meaningful time to actually spend with Paul & Alice. Not a problem if we were to spend the weekend not going anywhere and just chill out with them and their 4 cats in Epping - which sounded like an ideal way to relax at the midpoint of our trip. So, thats what we did!
(Footnote: Yes the Epping Railway was running while we were there, yes we thought about going, and yes, nothing much of interest was running while we were there - that went for both Paul and I!).