Daily Hive · সাধারণ

TransLink's vintage 99 B-Line bus gets a collectible brick building kit made of LEGO, celebrating the route's 30-year anniversary

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Metro Vancouver’s busiest bus route is being recreated in a very small way to celebrate its three decades on the road.

Heritage Bricks has partnered with TransLink on a new brick-building kit celebrating the 99 B-Line’s 30th anniversary, giving public transit fans a chance to recreate the articulated bus using real LEGO pieces.

The 430-piece set depicts a model of bus used on the 99 B-Line in 2002, complete with its blue, white, and yellow colour scheme and familiar accordion-style middle. Heritage Bricks describes it as its largest model kit to date.

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The custom design captures plenty of small details that longtime passengers might recognize, including the literal bee logo of the 99 B-Line, a front-mounted bicycle rack, side mirrors, and destination signs displaying the route’s name.

Its rear even includes miniature versions of the signs thanking drivers for braking and reminding motorists to yield. A matching bus stop sign completes the scene.

Inside, there is also a recreation of the interior of the vehicle, with seating and overhead bars for standing passengers.

Heritage Bricks/TransLink

The kit is listed at $149.99 on the Heritage Bricks website. Like Heritage Bricks’ other creations, it uses real LEGO parts assembled into a custom Metro Vancouver-inspired design.

According to the company’s announcement, online pre-orders on Heritage Bricks’ website close at 11:55 pm on Oct. 31, 2026, with orders scheduled to be fulfilled between Dec. 11 and 21 — just in time for Christmas.

This past summer, in partnership with Vancouver-made Callister Craft Soda, TransLink also released a limited-edition, 99 B-Line-themed blueberry and honey canned soda beverage, with public transit-themed packaging featuring the service’s original bee logo.

Heritage Bricks/TransLink

The bus brick-building kit is the latest addition to Heritage Bricks’ collaborations with TransLink, following its miniature SkyTrain sets.

In October 2025, they launched the SkyTrain Generations Building Kits featuring the Mark I, Mark II, Mark III, and Mark V cars on the Expo and Millennium lines, celebrating the 40th anniversary of SkyTrain. Each kit included the pieces needed to build a train car, a section of track, and part of a station platform. That release was limited to 700 kits, with 175 of each train design.

Another release followed earlier in 2026, expanding the collection to include SkyTrain’s Canada Line train, alongside a second edition of the four generations of the trains used on the Expo and Millennium.

Currently, Heritage Bricks is not offering a re-release of the SkyTrain kits.

For Fall 2026, the brick building kit celebrates a bus route that has carried generations of students, workers, and other passengers across Metro Vancouver.

The 99 B-Line first began service in 1996, initially running between Lougheed Mall in Burnaby and the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus along Lougheed Highway and Broadway. Its original route was considerably longer than the one passengers know today.

Following the opening of the Millennium Line in 2002 — the year represented by the new bus model — this bus route was shortened to run between UBC and Commercial-Broadway Station.

According to TransLink statistics, in 2025, the 99 B-Line saw nearly 10.7 million annual boardings, with averages of 34,700 per weekday, 20,700 per Saturday, and 15,100 per Sunday/holiday.

99 B-Line running along Wesbrook Mall at UBC. (TransLink)

translink 99 b-line articulated bus snow

99 B-Line articulated bus operating in snow. (Daily Hive)

In late 2027, the Millennium Line’s Broadway extension from the existing VCC-Clark Station to Arbutus Street will open, at which point the 99 B-Line route will be truncated once again — running between UBC and the new Arbutus Station only, with the existing segment between Arbutus Street and Commercial-Broadway Station discontinued.

As previously reported by Daily Hive Urbanized earlier this week, TransLink is currently in the process of determining whether the next iteration of the 99 B-Line after the subway’s opening will carry a new name, effectively ending Metro Vancouver’s decades-old “B-Line” branding for a faster, frequent, limited-stop bus route. Since 2020, other existing B-Line routes and new routes have taken on the “RapidBus” branding.

When the Millennium Line is further extended from Arbutus Station to reach UBC, potentially in the 2030s, this express bus service will be fully discontinued.

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