By “less London-centric”, presumably you mean that people’s journeys to where they actually want to go (ie London) are harder, but making journeys to other major cities easier?
That's not what's meant by London-centric. I'm specifically thinking of the many journeys avoiding London, most of which are currently made by car, that require a long and expensive detour via London to be done by rail at the moment. The few operators that do provide this service (XC, EMR, TPE) are ridiculously low on capacity.
Making the rest of the country better-off does not mean we need to disadvantage rail links into London.
A frequent 1-change option is always going to be a better use of capacity than 4 trains a day to the end of every branch line. With a decent quality transfer at a station (accessible and reliable) the only downside is just a feeling of minor inconvenience, though I suspect it's less convenient when one of the 4 direct trains get cancelled (fully or in part) with there being no convenient alternative.
And by the way, I did post about 2 paragraphs about how to deliver Shrewsbury a proper London service which makes your (presumably quickly posted after reading 1 sentence) comment particularly strange to read. I do hope it's easy enough to understand that it's not a zero-sum game though and I really don't see the point in debating whether opting for either of the two 'extremes' is practical.
There's anyway only a small number of places with London services where improving the local train service and transfer reliability would IMO be better (Beverley, Skipton, Pontefract to name three) - if there's a significant number of London passengers from these stations who would shift to driving if needing to change trains (without a notable journey time increase), then colour me surprised.
Most of these extensions are logical enough to keep, Blackpool (extension of a Preston terminator) or Middlesbrough (York terminator) for instance are both good ideas. But e.g. diverting one of the London-Holyhead services to Llandudno to give it a direct train to the city where everything happens raises a few questions about whether we want a rail
network or something more akin to an airline.
The fact that London's one of the hardest cities to drive & park in does factor into the equation as well - I know quite a few people who only use the train to get to London for this exact reason, that's not to say it isn't the highest-demand city but things do also happen decently often in Manchester or Birmingham too, yet rail's mode share for long-distance travel is way below London. If other cities follow suit over time then there'll be even more demand by rail to secondary cities.
They don't exist. Under the current (and next) timetable, every Wolverhampton to Euston service after 07:00 starts at Crewe or further north, and the same goes for every Euston to Wolverhampton service arriving before 20:00.
Well then I guess it wouldn't work as well, though London-Scotland via Birmingham services don't have much through travel anyway so reworking it into 2 services (London-Shrewsbury and Birmingham-Scotland) wouldn't be that unpopular, even if it does require HS2 phase 1 to get the paths required for it. Good thing there's a 15-20 minute same platform transfer at International then.
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