I would like to see a set standard across the "Intercity" services - hopefully not a race to the bottom. However I don't think we will see it anytime soon with the various fleets having different types of seating, layouts, amities etc.
Agree here - would argue key thing is availability of somewhat proper hot food - don't care about presentation and cooking methods, but access to high quality hot food should be a must on almost all long distance and semi long distance services. To maximise capacity there should be a focus on online payment and off train preparation, with potentially kitchens at stations cooking food on behalf of established brands, with hot food loaded and distributed on trains in line with advance orders.
2 trains each way at Penzance at the moment (1 pair Edinburgh, 1 from Bristol, 1 to Birmingham), 4 trains per day at Dundee (1 to Aberdeen, 1 Aberdeen to Plymouth, 1 Plymouth to Dundee, 1 Dundee to Edinburgh), two return Glasgow to Plymouth and one Edinburgh to Glasgow service, and no Doncaster to Southampton or CrossCountry Guildford or Bath services.
Not nearly enough to mean you should be getting small fleets and splitting trains in my view.
Would agree here - Manchester-Cardiff in a MK4 is the absolute gold standard for cross country services, both across regional express and intercity routes. XC will see fleet replacement in the medium term, which is the chance to achieve a true step change in service from the Voyagers and Turbostars. However there will obviously be a desire to cram too many seats into too short of a train, so hopefully commonality of stock enables a high quality replacement, with the perfect option in my opinion being a slightly shorter, 10 coach bi-mode 745. This balances the key requirements of XC with it's high passenger turnover, that is unlikely to change regardless of devolution while providing proper service and facilities.
Thar isn't going to increase the number of paths available over those routes. Sheffield to Meadowhall is a fairly congested stretch of track. Where is the path going to come from to run a dedicated Sheffield to Leeds fast, as well as the existing CrossCountry service. The same applies with Coventry to Wolverhampton. The nature of the English railway is that all the trains on a corridor have to play their share in moving the passengers who want to make those journeys.
Northern are starting a new Leeds to Sheffield via Wakefield Westgate fast service from December. The point is that if devolved authorities have more power and finances to invest in the infrastructure necessary to run more local services this will have a massive benefit for XC no longer being the sole operator of more local (i.e. less than 50 miles) fast flows.
They may no longer be the sole operator on such flows, but to cut out major stops, or impose pickup/dropoff restrictions would be incredibly unpopular and hit long distance customers. Therefore XC will always have more short distance customers than an operator such as Avanti or LNER. This can be accommodated by measures such as ensuring there is sufficient capacity. Separation of local, regional and intercity passengers is ridiculous and a unfeasible pipe dream that would increase subsidy and reduce the attractiveness of the railway.
In pre-sectorisation BR days, IIRC that was how it worked - the services were planned by inter-regional committees, with resources allocated to/provided by each region involved (which was all five of them to varying degrees). But when any old loco (even a no-heat one in the summer) could haul a vacuum-braked set of Mk1s, life was somewhat simpler (and slower).
For me they're pretty equivalent, with XC centred on Birmingham and TPE centred on Manchester.
XC is an intercity operator (mostly) and so is Transpennine Express (mostly). While Leicester/Nottingham to Birmingham are not XC services and should be WM services in the same way that Manchester-York via Castleford and Leeds-Huddersfield should not be TPE services.
The number of voters for whom XC matters is tiny, and the seats aren't marginal. Spending on other areas of government and not the railway is going to be more important as far as the red wall voters go. XC simply isn't a voting matter because the issues are spread across the country.
To mix it up a bit, let's have a thread about fusing TPE and XC together!