Royal Holloway Bus: RHU Timetable

Royal Holloway is served by the Diamond Bus South East RHU service, the one most students mean by "the campus bus": it runs daily and connects Hox Park, the main campus and Egham railway station.

At a glance

• RHU: Hox Park, Royal Holloway (Founder's Building), Elmbank Avenue, Egham Station. Runs daily. £1 flat fare to and from Egham Station, free on every other section of the route.

The service follows the academic year, so it stops during the holidays and starts again when term does.

The RHU: campus to Egham Station

The RHU is a loop with four stops, and it runs in both directions. Clockwise it goes Egham Station, Founder's Building, Elmbank Avenue, Hox Park. Anti-clockwise it runs the same stops the other way round, ending at Egham Station.

Each leg takes about eight minutes, so Egham Station to the Founder's Building is roughly eight minutes and the full run from the station out to Hox Park is about 24.

Fares and the £1 zone

Egham Station is the only paid stop. Any journey that starts or ends there costs a £1 flat fare, and everything else on the route is free, so hopping between the Founder's Building, Elmbank Avenue and Hox Park costs nothing. This trips people up in both directions: students pay for journeys they did not need to, and others get caught out expecting the station leg to be free like the rest.

How often it runs

Every 40 minutes through the day, then hourly late on. From Egham Station towards campus, the first bus is at 07:00 and they leave every 40 minutes up to 20:20. After that it goes hourly: 21:18, 22:18, 23:18 and 00:18.

Coming back the other way the pattern matches, with the last bus of the night reaching Egham Station at 01:16. That late service is the reason the RHU is worth knowing about if you are coming back from London on a Friday, since the walk up Egham Hill in the dark is not much fun.

Elmbank Avenue is evening only

Elmbank Avenue is on the route but is only served by evening journeys. There are five in each direction. Towards Hox Park it is first called at 20:36, and towards Egham Station from 21:00, with the last at 01:00. During the day, use the Founder's Building or Hox Park instead. Turning up at Elmbank at two in the afternoon and waiting is a common first-year mistake.

What happens out of term

The RHU takes a break over Christmas, Easter and the summer, which catches out anyone arriving early for an open day or moving in ahead of Welcome Week. The Royal Holloway term dates guide has the full year if you are planning around it.

RHUL Mobile checks Diamond Bus every day for whether the service is running, so out of term it tells you the bus is not running and when it comes back, rather than showing you departure times that will not happen.

Reading the times in the app

Bus times in RHUL Mobile show the operator's published departures counted down to the minute, so instead of reading a column of times and doing the arithmetic you see how long until the next bus.

• Fare and stop labels: Egham Station is marked as the £1 zone and Elmbank Avenue is flagged as evening only, so you are not working it out from a PDF.
• Saved stops: pin the stops you actually use and they sit at the top of the tab.
• Departure reminders: set one on any departure and the app tells you about seven minutes before the bus goes.
• Offline: the timetable is saved to your phone, so departures still show when there is no signal halfway down the hill.
• Home screen widget: on iPhone, the Next Bus widget puts your chosen stops on the home screen.

One thing it does not do is track individual buses. The times are the scheduled ones, so the app cannot tell you that a particular bus is running late.

Getting there without the RHU

The RHU is not the only way to move around. If you are arriving at Egham station and deciding between the bus, the walk and a taxi, the Egham station to Royal Holloway guide compares all three. For the journey in from further afield, including the train from London Waterloo, driving and both airports, see getting to Royal Holloway.

Confirm before you rely on it

Operators change timetables, and this guide was last checked on the date shown above. The times here come from the published Diamond Bus timetable. Before you rely on a specific departure, check the operator's own page: the RHU service page.