Forgive me Chester1, but your post exactly characterises the small-mindedness of the DfT... a perfectly useful service needs to be cut because it risks being delayed and it's "too long." This is the railway deciding what services to offer based not on passenger need, but on operational efficiency.
Small mindedness?
They are prioritising the large number of people who want a reliable service over relatively short distance commutes, say journeys up to fifty miles (over the lower number of people who travel over a hundred and fifty miles)
Look at today's Sheffield - Manchester - Liverpool (South Parkway) service:
- 06:18 left two minutes late
- 07:32 left over four minutes late
- 08:41 left over four minutes late
- 09:40 was on time (!!!!)
- 10:40 left over a minute late
- 11:41 left over five minutes late
- 12:41 left over three minutes late
- 13:40 left over two minutes late
- 14:41 left over a minute late
- 15:40 left over six minutes late
- 16:40 left over three minutes late
- 17:40 left three minutes late
- 18:40 left over a minute late
- 19:40 left over a minute late
- 20:31 left over seven minutes late (the 20:31 terminates at Manchester because EMT run ECS back from Liverpool in the evening since they don't have a depot, so there's no services later than 19:40 from Sheffield to Liverpool - another thing that a change of TOC may change)
That may only look like a minute or two here or there, but almost every service was late - and these trains need to deal with single track bottlenecks at Dore and Hazel Grove before they get over the Stockport Viaduct and through the congested 13/14 corridor at Piccadilly, before trying to get to Oxford Road before the half hourly Northern stoppers occupy the line through Warrington - e.g. the 11:41 from Sheffield was so late today that the Oxford Road - Warrington service was let out ahead of it, further delaying longer distance passengers.
Maybe a few minutes here and there don't look so bad if you are doing a journey like Norwich to Liverpool - there's often sufficient recovery time at the final station that a service can be seen to catch up with any "lost" minutes, but the long distance nature of the service means that people doing short journeys (e.g. I know a couple of people who commute from Stockport to Sheffield) are at the mercy of disruptions far away.
What would have been better would have been to bring the Birmingham - Stansted route into the same franchise as Liverpool - Norwich, and interwork them so you have Birmingham to Norwich and Stansted alternating, and Liverpool to Norwich and Stansted alternating.
How are you planning on running the Peterborough - Ely services then? Half hourly (which means there'd be two Norwich services within half an hour of each other (and nothing for Norwich for another ninety minutes), then two Stansted services within half an hour of each other (and a similar ninety minute gap in the next Stansted service)? Or run the two services (from Peterborough to Ely) within a few minutes of each other, so that the Fens effectively lose around half their current frequency to the ECML?
I see no positives for the travelling public in this change. What can possibly be improved by removing direct services, and splitting one route across operators?
What can be improved by giving people a more reliable service over the kind of short/medium distances that they may commute on a regular basis (albeit removing a longer distance service that they might find useful once or twice a year)?
What would be confusing for a passenger in Manchester to see trains every two hours to Norwich and trains every two hours to Cambridge? This is basically what existed at the start of Sprinter-isation in the late eighties: trains from Norwich alternated between Birmingham and Liverpool.
Yes, we had services from Blackpool/ Windermere/ Liverpool through to Ipswich/ Cambridge/ Norwich, but that was in the days when there was a lot more gap in the timetable for those kind of quirky services.
I never "get" why Liverpool to Norwich is supposedly too long a journey to operate reliably, when we run trains from Edinburgh to Plymouth, Manchester to Bournemourh, Manchester to Carmarthen/Milford Haven, Newcastle to Reading/Southampton etc. All at the same hourly frequency and all having to pass through a similar set of pinch points. Splitting Liverpool to Norwich merely illustrates the DfT's desperate need to be seen to be "doing something". In this case, this isn't a problem that actually needs fixing. So just leave well alone!
Although plenty of other long distance services have been chopped over the years - remember the "Yarmouth to Barmouth" railway (when Central Trains ran routes like Skegness - Manchester Airport)?
Those XC services that you referred to have some very long dwells at intermediate stations, which is the price you pay. They also tend to serve much bigger places than the section of route east of Nottingham that is being chopped here.