Is there really demand for direct London intercity trains from Llandudno, Gobowen and Walsall? Why those places?
You are assuming they are all day, they won't be, they will be peak time extensions.
The Llandudno service is less than that. The
DfT new franchise map page states:
one additional direct journey to and from London Euston per day on Saturdays during the summer months from May 2021
Running the numbers game on the announcements on that page, we also have:
- 12 new services for the "direct journey to and from Euston" for Gobowen Monday-Saturday
- 10? new services for the "additional direct service to and from London Euston" for Shrewsbury (days unspecified, assuming M-F)
- 5 new services for the North Wales Coast's "later last trains to London Euston Monday to Friday"
- 4 more for NWC's "earlier first trains and later last trains to and from London Euston on Saturdays" (two each way)
- 2 more for NWC's "earlier first trains from London Euston and later last trains to London Euston on Sundays"
- 4 new services for Chester's "earlier first trains and later last trains to and from London Euston on Saturdays and Sundays" (assuming the above NWC improvements are all just extensions of exiting Chester services)
- 12 for Walsall's "direct service to and from London Euston Monday to Saturday"
- 5? for Walsall's "additional northbound service from London" on unspecified days
(A lot of these will be extensions of existing services using the larger fleet that's replacing the Voyagers, and not needing extra capacity out of Euston.)
With the Llandudno service, I make that 56 extra "services".
The elephant not listed above is the second hourly service to Liverpool (which will need a path out of Euston). They "look to double service frequency to two trains per hour Monday to Saturday". An hourly service each way for twelve hours a day, six days of the week, would only account for 144 of the remaining 207 extra services from that headline figure. So we've got roughly 60 missing services somewhere.
In the article linked in the OP, we find the following sentence:
Today’s award confirms that, from December 2022, passengers will benefit from 263 extra train services every week, with Motherwell set to become a major calling point for most West Coast Partnership services.
Motherwell currently has two West Coast services passing through each way each hour. If the powers that be are counting stopping existing trains at Motherwell as providing a new "service", that would be more than enough to make up the missing sixty services. (In fact, 2tph each way, six days of the week, calling at Motherwell could make 200 new services in little more than an eight-hour day, so perhaps the potential Liverpool services weren't actually included in the headline figure.)
