Getting home by tube after midnight over Xmas festivities

I'm going to be out every night this week and I reckon that I'll only be getting the tube home once mainly because I live in zone 4 and whatever the London Underground say about the tube running from central London till 12.30am, if you're travelling back late and have to change once in central London you're stuffed if you want to get home, as the minute you make that change, you've usually missed any last train heading out to places in the "back of beyond" (hardly) like Richmond, Ealing Broadway, and Wimbledon. Goodness knows how people get home to Barking and Upminster and other places in the East which are even further out than the District Line wasteland areas above.

If I can get to Hammersmith by twenty to one in the morning I can make the very last train into Richmond. So leaving anywhere vaguely central in town at 12.30 would give me ten minutes to get to Glamoursmith, which just isn't going to happen.



When I went to the UK bloggers party I left a zone one part of central London at about 12.15 or 12.20am and got to King's Cross to find all the last trains had gone and then had to get a night bus home which meant I eventually got home at 3am. This was on a Saturday night.

So is the tube ever going to be a way of getting home for late nighters who don't live in zone one or zone two?