London's next dead bus R6: Orpington to St Mary Cray Location: southeast London, outer Length of journey: 4 miles, 25 minutes
It's time to kill off another London bus route, the fourth such erasure this year. Routes 347, 118 and 414 have already been extinguished and at the end of this week it's time for the R6 to join them at the big terminus in the sky. You won't miss it.
Orpington has a long-standing network of R-prefix buses, introduced in 1986 under the 'Roundabout' brand. Every few years they get rejigged, so for example the R6 which dies this week is the third such route with that number and was introduced in 2001. At present there are 11 buses numbered R1 to R11 but this withdrawal removes the middle one, ending the consecutive streak.
The R6 exists to serve a couple of estates on Orpington's periphery and also to link them to trains at St Mary Cray station. It runs every half an hour and operates with two vehicles. It's not the least used of the R buses - the R2, R5, R8 and R10 have fewer passengers - but it is probably the least consequential unless you happen to live in the right place.
In a now familiar tactic, TfL are withdrawing the R6 and replacing it in full by another route. That replacement is the B14, an outlier from the Bexley bus empire which runs via a fairly twiddly route between Bexleyheath and Orpington. The intention is to add one more twiddle at the southern end, following the R6's route in its entirety rather than a direct run from St Mary Cray to Orpington. It'll make every journey on the B14 at least ten minutes longer, the mitigation being that B14 passengers can always catch the more frequent R11 instead and not end up wasting their lives on a lengthy detour.
The B14 also runs every half an hour so nobody's getting a less frequent service, indeed the new timetable means a better early morning and late evening service so it's an improvement overall. And because the B14 only needs one extra vehicle to cover the withdrawal of the R6's two, TfL's accountants also save some money in the process. The aim as ever is "to operate a more efficient bus service", and the appropriate buzzphrase is "to better match bus services to customer demand".
In the interests of documenting an imminently extinct species, let's go for a ride.
The R6 kicks off from the lengthy bus stand outside Orpington station, alongside its single decker sisters R3, R5, R9 and R10. The parking space at the end now accommodates the overhead charger for the pantographs on route 358, the tram buses that got social media excited a few months ago. The B14 also starts here, conveniently, and will be shadowing us for the next mile and a half through the town centre.
The first stop at the bottom of the road is Tubbenden Lane. It ranks highly amongst the busiest bus stops in London, being served by as many as 17 TfL bus routes, although that'll be going down to 16 from Saturday. It's also despised by at least one local resident who recently submitted a vituperative FoI.
TfL fobbed him off with a suggestion he looked at their collisions dashboard, which I have and there have only been two 'slight' collisions here over a seven year period. Those fears of lunacy are thus misplaced, which is good news for the hordes of passengers who would have been instantly disadvantaged had this awkwardly located stop been closed.
Orpington High Street is a peculiar beast, bus-wise, with umpteen different routes launching off in all directions and shoppers keenly squinting to see precisely which R this is. Some of those routes have to deviate off-piste to get here but the R6 is heading through anyway, which always helps. A dozen passengers pile aboard with bags of shopping, which I reckon is impressive for a minor route mid-morning, or might be because the bus is running fifteen minutes late and they've been waiting ages. One is recognised by a seated neighbour... "Hello John" she says. Two others suffer the beep of shame when neither of their cards work, nor on the second attempt but alternative plastic means third time lucky.
We bear off from the main drag at Priory Gardens, which is good because there are long-term roadworks on Cray Avenue so we're dodging a bullet there. Only the R4 and R6 head up the High Street so they're the go-to choice for every car-less resident this side of the River Cray. The houses are older here and the roads narrower because this has been a hub of cottages since Victorian times. I'm mystified by the name of the next stop being Reynolds Cross/Red Lion because no pub of that name exists, but all is explained by a converted residential building on the corner of Red Lion Close. The White Horse, more recently shuttered, looks like it'll be going the same way soon.
Ten minutes in we turn off on our special excursion up Blacksmiths Lane. The only other bus that goes this way is the 477, an hourly non-TfL service to Swanley and Dartford, but you can't wave an Oyster on that. And then we turn off again for a trunk-shaped loop up a very ordinary residential sidestreet, the kind that wouldn't normally get a service elsewhere in London. Here it's needed so that a couple of hundred homes don't find themselves too far from a red bus, and also so that residents of the further-flung hamlet of Kevington get a vague return on their council tax. By the time we've done the one-way circuit barely anyone is left aboard.
For our second loop we veer off round another estate, poorer this time, wedged between the railway embankment and the edge of the Green Belt. If you always thought Orpington was well-to-do you've never been to these eastern fringes, ditto the Ramsden Estate the R9 serves. The trees certainly give the place a lift though. This also feels like the estate TfL forgot, with a faded mid-pandemic poster claiming "Contactless, the safest way to pay" still on display in the farthest shelter. The bus stops on Wotten Green are just flags on lampposts, one without a pavement so no chance of lowering a ramp were it needed, and both blocked by parked cars because nobody's ever come along and painted BUS STOP on the road.
A schoolboy hops aboard as we enter the last half mile, his target the station across the valley. To get there we return to the High Street by the village green, which isn't anywhere near as nice as you're imagining, then duck beneath a lofty railway viaduct. On one side are roofing supplies and auto traders, and on the other side a 13th century church with cedar shingles because St Mary Cray is much more historic than it looks.
But after the penultimate stop it all goes wrong as we join a short but persistent queue of traffic trying to pass a set of lights. It's all the fault of those aforementioned roadworks which are making it very difficult to filter onto Sevenoaks Way, whose queue looks considerably worse than ours. It takes eight minutes to escape, instantly wrecking the timetable and likely scuppering our student's rail connection. When there are only two vehicles operating a bus route it's never good to see both on the same street, right near the end of the route.
I'm guessing that passengers on the B14 won't be happy to find themselves dawdling round the outer estates of St Mary Cray next week, thinking "oh goodness we can't be turning off down there as well good grief we are". And there's every chance they won't be expecting it because from what I saw nobody's gone round and stuck up any posters advertising the change at any of the R6's bus stops, or they hadn't at the start of the week. It could be a very simple poster too, it only needs to say "catch the B14 instead" and be done with it. Instead a big surprise is coming to Orpington as yet another bus route dies, to better match services to customer demand and to save TfL a bit of dosh.
