Every route 99. 3 of 24

Saturday 21st February 2026

This year’s third exploration of Britain’s 24 bus routes numbered 99 finds us in south east London on a journey between Woolwich and Bexleyheath.

Buses on route 99 were plying the roads between Woolwich and Erith even before London Transport was formed in 1933 being a key part of the network linking these important communities. The route was extended beyond Erith to Slade Green railway station in 1979, but cut back to Erith six years later in 1985 only to be extended again in 2009 but this time beyond Slade Green back towards Bexleyheath which it’s continued to do ever since and provides a rather unusual trajectory forming a ‘U shape’ at the eastern end of the route.

Not surprisingly, as I found on my sample journey, the bus emptied out when we arrived from Woolwich in Erith town centre, only for a fresh intake of passengers as we headed south to Slade Green including the loop around to serve either side of the station before heading westwards to Bexleyheath.

But, let’s begin at the western end of the route at the terminus in Woolwich, which as you can see is in the shadows of the towns relatively recently built tower blocks of flats in the High Street, albeit the retail offer at that location is not what one might expect from a traditional High Street.

As indicated by the bus stop flag photographed above, route 99 shares the first bus stop with two other High Street terminating routes – the 51 and 386. Suffice to say while timetables outlining departures were in place for those two routes, for my route 99, there was nothing. Even though, as you can see (below) there is plenty of room, such is the demise of decent information standards from TfL these days.

Buses on the three routes take advantage of a short bus stand layby just east of the bus stop and I patiently waited for the smart new Go-Ahead London Wright StreetDeck Electroliner with 99 Bexleyheath screened up to power up and glide the few yards down to the bus stop and pick me up.

But the omens were not looking good. The bus was due away at 11:36 but I could see the driver having intense discussions on his mobile phone and every so often wandering to the back of the bus to look at the nearside tyre. Buses on route 51 came and went on their long trek south to Orpington, even a bus on the 20 minutely route 386 headed off to Blackheath, but still the 99 was showing no sign of life.

Every so often I’d wander up to see what the driver was up to and whether the next bus had arrived. It was particularly frustrating as I’d just missed the previous departure at 11:23 and the time was now 11:49 when the next bus after the 11:36 should have been leaving – the frequency being a clunky every 13 minutes at this time of the day.

Finally, at 11:51 with mobile phone call completed, the driver jumped in the cab, and came on down to the bus stop where it was still just myself waiting to board. I asked if there’d been a problem and he explained he’d had concerns about the rear nearside tyre but had received reassurance from the depot it was safe to proceed.

Route 99 is operated out of Go-Ahead’s long standing former London Transport bus garage in Bexleyheath and has 14 buses allocated to provide the route length of 10 miles with a 13 minute frequency (15 minutes at the weekends). The Electroliner buses are a recent introduction to the service and have higher backed seats as is becoming standard in London these days…

… and much improved information displays including predictive journey times, which as you can see a convoluted routing around Woolwich town centre gives a nine minute journey time to reach one of the town’s many stations (this one called simply Woolwich being on the Elizabeth line). It would take less than that to walk it along High Street.

Woolwich station is the fifth stop after leaving the High Street terminus, and not surprisingly by the time we reached there we’d picked up 32 passengers – with one boarding at the first stop in Hare Street, nine at the third stop in Thomas Street and 22 boarding at the fourth stop opposite Woolwich Arsenal Southeastern and DLR stations and six more at Woolwich station itself.

I must admit I’d expected it to be even busier seeing as how we were 15 minutes late and there’d been a 28 minute gap in the service.

There are many other bus routes which head eastwards from Woolwich towards neighbouring Plumstead. I counted 10 besides the 99 and passengers enjoy a bus a minute (62 buses per hour).

At the bus stop for Plumstead bus garage there’s a short stretch of bus only road with traffic lights enabling buses heading due east to cut across the two lanes of traffic and through another ‘bus only’ slip road as can be seen in the above photo, but frustratingly, as the bus enters the latter, the traffic signals that had been on green, turn to red as can be seen in the below photo, and the bus has to wait for turning traffic to pass across. Which all seemed a bit counter productive for bus priority.

We then continued east along High Street which leads into Bostall Hill, in the photo below…

… which is the first section of route where the 99 is all alone

… and continues into a more green area approaching Upper Belvedere…

… where for a brief distance we’re joined by route 469 as well as route 401 which crosses our path on its way from Bexleyheath to Thamesmead. No-one from here would catch a 99 to Bexleyheath since the 401 would take you directly there in 10 minutes whereas our route via Erith and Slade Green will take 36 minutes.

But we’re popular with Erith bound passengers as we continue our easterly trajectory as we’re back on our own again along Erith Road…

… and Fraser Road where buses on route 180 join in the fun to serve a new housing development to the west of Erith town centre and we cross over the railway and after a circuit of Erith’s town centre itself…

… we arrive at the main bus stop…

… where everyone except me alights and eight new passengers join. It’s now 12:31 and we’ve clawed back four minutes being now only 11 minutes behind time after our delayed start.

Since Woolwich we’ve picked up 23 more passengers at 11 bus stops and the many buses we’ve passed towards Woolwich have carried around a dozen or so passengers.

We’re now heading towards Slade Green and there’s a distinct change in the ambiance as lampposts are all adorned with flags…

… and on street parking makes for a challenging drive along narrow residential roads…

… until we reach the eastern entrance to the station before heading over the railway…

… through a rather tricky narrow corner…

… which involved mounting the kerb, so good job our rear tyre was pronounced fit for the road…

…before reaching the western entrance to the station on the other side of the tracks, three minutes later.

It makes for another interesting squiggle of a route.

After that came more challenging driving along roads with width restricting on street parking as we’re briefly joined by buses on route 428…

… before, heading west and we’re in the home straight literally – along Northall Road towards Bexleyheath.

And it’s not long before the setting down point for terminating buses in Bexleyheath town centre comes into view and the 13 passengers who’ve joined us since Erith alight, as do I.

It’s now 12:58, and taken us 67 minutes to complete the 10 mile journey making for an average speed of 9 mph. We were due to arrive at 12:49 and take 73 minutes meaning, despite carrying a double load, we managed to claw back six minutes of lateness having carried 83 passengers in total.

To greet us at the terminal point was a high-viz wearing member of the engineering team who presumably wanted to just take a look at the worrying tyre for himself, although I have to say, I didn’t spot anything obviously wrong either.

And that’s London’s route 99. But finally, for nostalgia, here’s a photo of one of the more unusual vehicle types, a single deck Metro Scania prototype, that operated for a trial on the service in April 1970 reproduced here with many thanks to Martin Curtis.

Roger French

Did you catch the previous blog in this series? 1 of 24 Eastbourne-Hastings, 2 of 24 Petworth-Chichester.

Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS