I was wondering which sizeable town has the least direct rail route from London. I thought of Cheltenham, Gloucester, Hereford and maybe some of the big towns in the Pennines. If I'm not mistaken the shortest route from London to Cheltenham was via High Wycombe, Oxford, Kingham and Andoversford. But on the whole, since the GW cut-offs were built before 1914, most main lines from London have been reasonably direct, with nothing like the detour via Dijon that used to lengthen the route from Paris to Lyon before the LGV was built.