Let's conclude my X-rated bus journey aboard London's three eXpress routes.
I've already written about the X68 and the X26 and that just leaves the X140.
In good news it's the short one.
Route X140: Heathrow Central - Harrow Length of journey: 10 miles, timetabled 50 minutes
London's newest limited stop service, the X140, first ran in December 2019 to support a Crossrail launch that eventually happened three years later. Since then it's filtered out the long distance traffic from once-thronged route 140 and become a popular route in its own right. Its success is probably the driving force behind the creation of the Superloop - that and the political need for the Mayor to look like he's doing something - and four further orbital expresses should appear over the next couple of years. One reason I'm riding the three existing Xs now is to stop myself ever wanting to ride the entire purgatorial circuit later.
Normally you only end up waiting at Heathrow Central bus station if you've arrived on a plane or if you work at the airport. At 8pm a fair few staff have just come off shift and are looking forward to heading home, while longer-distance travellers sit patiently beside their luggage before filtering off to destinations across the country. Whoever designed the bus station made accessing the coach bays easy whereas to reach local buses requires negotiating a pedestrian crossing where tabarded staff have to be employed to keep dazed holidaymakers out of the path of 55-seaters. Bus stops here serve multiple destinations within London and the Home Counties, and if there hasn't been a departure for some time (which was the case on my visit) a milling free-for-all can ensue. A Countdown display would be useful here, given the variety of routes and sheer volume of passengers, but this is Heathrow's domain and no such live information is provided.
I get to wait 15 minutes amid the increasing gaggle until a rested driver finally heads over to reboot the service. I join the general pile-on, stuck for a while behind two ladies lugging aboard three bulky silver suitcases wrapped in clingfilm which promptly fill up most of the wheelchair space. But I'm swift enough to get one of the seats at the front of the upper deck, even if that means resting my feet in a pit of orange peel and Red Bull cans, because on the X140 it seems downstairs is a much more popular place to be. Escaping from the bus station takes a while, and at one point the only traffic that seems to be moving anywhere are the cars spiralling relentlessly up the ramps into the multi-storey. Come on, I think, sunset's exactly an hour away and I'd really like to complete this journey in daylight.
And then we're off, past the sign reminding pedestrians and cyclists that they cannot escape the airport, and into the tunnel, under the runways and out onto the roundabout on the far side. Bath Road is a downbeat agglomeration of near-airport development, a succession of boxy hotels and inoffensive dining opportunities aimed at those with the misfortune of starting their holidays twelve hours early. It must be galling to pay quite so much for a room you'll barely sleep in because airport check-in needs to be completed by 6am. We sail past all of that and stop at Harlington Corner, dodging several large puddles deposited by an earlier cloudburst, and as we trundle on northwards the pull of the airport gradually starts to fade.
Harlington is a historic village - note the flinty church - with the misfortune of having been subsequently divided in two by the M4. We rise up to cross the motorway via a sweeping flyover and then descend gently, like a plane coming into land, onto a sprawling landscape of red-roofed houses. We're fast coming up on Hayes and Harlington station, a halt once located in neither location but which has since dragged the local centre of gravity relentlessly towards it. It thus boasts large retail estates instead of halftimbered pubs and an upthrust of towers because the West End is suddenly just 25 minutes away. We stop once at the station and once in the town centre where trade is winding down but fast food service is ramping up. Here teenage sweethearts swig from bottles on benches, Sikhs in matching blue turbans queue for pizza and backslapping bros greet each other mid-street without a thought for passing traffic.
The Grapes is the only other interchange on London's current express route network - change here for the 607 to Uxbridge - but far from being a historic pub is more a roadside stopover from the golden age of motoring and survives today as a Beefeater steak house. From here onwards the journey starts to become a bit of a blur, not because I've been on the move for five hours but because the Hillingdon/Ealing borders are impressively undistinguished. Nondescript interwar housing, front gardens stuffed with cars, occasional parades, and repeat. We're following what 100 years ago was a country lane before suddenly being yanked into life as a suburban artery feeding umpteen thousand acres of semis. One does not ride through Yeading for the sightseeing opportunities it offers, more to get to the other side.
If I had to focus on minor points of interest I'd draw your attention to the occasional startling postwar church, the most undistinguished of libraries and the odd serious roundabout where traffic sometimes grinds to a halt. But the sun is now low in the sky and traffic really isn't a problem, especially on these efficiently broad roads, and so we thunder on into Northolt. Aboard the bus I'm earwigging phone conversations in three languages I don't understand. In front of us a cyclist is riding no-handed, it being more important to hold onto a can and a phone than the handlebars. Across the street a halal meat store is closing down for the day long after its neighbours have shuttered and gone home. The coronation clocktower puts the time at ten to nine and I think yes I am going to do this, I am going to reach Harrow by dusk.
There follow three stations you can't catch a direct train between - that's Northolt, Northolt Park and South Harrow - which is one reason why an express bus service can be so useful. That said I haven't seen an X140 going the other way for ages, and checking Citymapper confirms the service is irregularly intermittent tonight with just one vehicle currently heading south. On we dash between the cricket pitches of Harrow, admiring the ancient church on-the-Hill and taking advantage of a shortcut the ordinary 140 doesn't get to follow. Only the final one-way twiddle into the town centre slows us down, because this has been a stonkingly fast ride, and at long last we're pulling into Harrow bus station and my chain of three X-rated buses is at an end. Stop the clock, I want to get off, and ideally never to try that again.
According to my watch it's 21:02. According to the red LED clock in the bus station it's 21:04. According to the red LED clock at the other end of the bus station it's 21:05, because why bother getting the time right, it's not like anyone checks timetables any more. Whatever, I have indeed completed my journey before sunset and with quarter of an hour to spare, thereby validating my decision to delay this ridiculous challenge until the height of summer.
Congratulations to kewman for correctly guessing 21:02 would be my finish time. Also to ap and to 'R' for guessing 21:04 and 21:05, the times shown on the bus station clock. Most impressively if you calculate the average guess the median was 21:03 and the mean was 21:02, which was exactly right, which just goes to show the power of crowdsourcing.
Here's how my journey should have progressed according to the schedules and here's what actually happened due to the impact of traffic, weather and general congestion.
timetabled
actual
X68
Russell Square West Croydon 12 miles
1540 1708 1h 28m
1540 1731 1h 51m
X26
West Croydon Heathrow 24 miles
1730 1926 1h 56m
1806 2000 1h 54m
X140
Heathrow Harrow 10 miles
1936 2029 53m
2017 2102 45m
That's two monster journeys of almost two hours each and one more of just 45 minutes. That's one bus that ran late, one that kept pretty much to time and one that arrived appreciably early. That's one journey averaging a miserable 6½mph and two further rides at a more reasonable 13mph. That's a total journey time of 5 hours 22 minutes, of which 4½ hours was travelling time and 52 minutes was waiting around inbetween. That's a list which essentially confirms that buses run slower at peak times and faster when traffic is light. That's a three-stage trip which ended half an hour later than it should have done because my first bus ran late and I just missed my connection. And that's a very long time to be sitting on a bus on a safari that's essentially for masochists only.
Expect a lot of fuss in coming months about the Superloop and how it's going to be an absolute gamechanger for outer London. It's not, as I hope I've demonstrated over the last three days, it's going to be a handful of express routes that probably don't go where you want to go and get stuck in traffic just like all the existing bus routes on that corridor. It'll be great to have and for orbital journeys it may well be quicker than taking a train, indeed my X140 journey was faster even than a Crossrail/Metropolitan combo would have been. But don't think you're going to encourage people to sell their cars and cram aboard a bus just because it has an X on the front, it'll take a lot more investment in infrastructure and bus priority schemes to manage that.
Route X140: Heathrow Central - Harrow
