The Superloop reaches Havering on 5 September

Outer London has a particular kind of journey: two places six miles apart, both perfectly well served towards the centre, and nothing sensible running between them. The SL12 is aimed squarely at one of those.

The new express bus links Gants Hill in Redbridge with Rainham in Havering, and it opens on Saturday 5 September 2026. It is the first time the Superloop has reached Havering at all.

Free for a week, but tap anyway

Travel on the SL12 is free until 12 September. That does not mean walking on: passengers still have to touch in with an Oyster or a contactless card, exactly as they would on any other bus. Nothing is deducted — the tap is how the trip gets counted.

It is worth doing properly for a reason beyond the rules. A new outer-London route lives or dies on its first fortnight of numbers, and a passenger who boards without tapping is a passenger who, as far as the data is concerned, was not there.

Forty minutes instead of an hour

The headline figure is the one that matters to anyone who already makes this trip: a journey that currently takes slightly over an hour comes down to about 40 minutes.

The route is built as a set of interchanges rather than a line between two points. It connects the Central, District, Overground and Elizabeth lines, and it passes both King George’s Hospital and Queen’s Hospital — which, for the boroughs it crosses, is probably the single most-used pair of destinations on it.

The timetable

The SL12 runs from 05:30 to 00:30 every day. Frequency is every 12 minutes through the day from Monday to Saturday, and every 15 minutes in the evenings and all day Sunday.

That evening and Sunday frequency is the part to note. Fifteen minutes is close to the threshold at which people stop consulting a timetable and simply turn up — which is the difference between a bus you plan around and a bus you use.

What the Superloop has done so far

The orange express network has been running since July 2023. Since then it has carried around 81 million trips and added 9.6 million bus kilometres a year to the network. Its ridership runs about 12% higher than on standard bus routes.

That last number is the argument for building more of them, and more are coming: further routes are planned for next year between Stratford and Chingford Hatch, and between Clapham Junction and Eltham.

Why this one is an outer-London story

Every Superloop route so far has traced the same shape — an orbital, joining outer centres to each other instead of feeding everyone through zone 1. Gants Hill to Rainham is that idea at its purest: neither end is anywhere near the middle of London, and the current alternative involves going in to come back out.