I travel from Wellingborough and two changes for a northbound service to Sheffield or even one change for what I call a local trip to Leicester is not progress. All it takes is a cancelled or late running service to totally mess up travel plans. Surely one of the Nottingham trains could have called at Wellingborough and the other Kettering.
It's a problem with no simple solution. There are half a dozen stations south of Leicester (worthy of some Leicester services) but no one obvious candidate for a significant number of trains to stop at (e.g. a Milton Keynes on the WCML or Reading on the GWML). Plus there's the issue that Long Distance High Speed services between Oxford/ Birmingham/ Liverpool/ Manchester/ Leeds (
broadly comparable to MML services in terms of journey times/ distances) don't stop at many "local" stations, as journey time is important.
My current favourite idea would be to have a broadly fifteen minute frequency from the River Trent to London - balanced out by giving the Sheffield services two stops before Leicester (East Midlands Parkway and Loughborough) and the Nottingham service stop twice south of Leicester (to ensure that the journey times are balanced) - so half hourly at Market Harborough and then bi-hourly at Bedford/ Luton/ Luton Airport plus Wellingborough/ Kettering every four hours.
Obviously the Corby services will provide a half hourly service at Wellingborough/ Kettering but I accept that it's hard to balance between fast journeys for longer distance passengers and regular direct services for people using stations south of Leicester.
Nottingham would still have regular services to East Midlands Parkway and Loughborough with the Ivanhoe services (possibly increased to half hourly, permitting some skip-stopping?) and this avoids the awkward 15/45 kind of splits currently on London services at East Midlands Parkway/ Loughborough (as well as Market Harborough having slightly unbalanced timings).
But that's completely the opposite of the approach taken with the 345 and 700 EMUs which are fixed full length trains, as the efficiency and capacity benefits clearly outweigh any benefits from being able to run half units
I guess that the difference is that the 345s and 700s are being built to do very specific jobs for routes that they will be stuck on for the next thirty/forty years - and the high frequency "metro" services they operate aren't going to have any joining/splitting - not can I see any need for shorter trains at off-peak times.
Whereas, with the MML, the AT300s being ordered might only be there for ten/ twenty years (the 222s are fifteen years old), so have to be designed for potential future cascades - maybe part of the thinking is that five coach trains will be more attractive for TOCs in the future - whereas a "nine" coach train might only be attractive to limited routes (and the kind of services that warrant a nine coach train are maybe the kind of services that warrant brand new trains on a regular basis, rather than twenty year old cascades).
Just my guessing, but you could make a case for five coach AT300s being useful on XC services, or maybe replacing the fun-sized HSTs at GWR/ ScotRail... whereas nine coach trains would have a more restricted future and Hitatchi are fearful of ending up in a situation where their modern trains are sat unwanted (which appears to be the fate for some modern classes of EMUs in the next couple of years).
Some members have posted back of fag packet calculations which show that barely over half will be doubled up
Just speculation but... if the services run on a Sheffield - London - Nottingham - London - Sheffield diagram (with a northbound "fast" forming the next southbound "slow"), that would mean each diagram cycles round roughly every eight hours... so you could schedule it so that the doubled up diagrams provided ten coach services into London in the morning rush hour and then ten coach services leaving London at tea time... so that even if only around half the services are due to be doubled up, you could work the timetable so that these trains work the busiest services each day.
(that's not to say that there aren't significant demands outside London - I have colleagues who regularly stand between Chesterfield and Sheffield each morning/ evening - I'm not unaware of busy flows beyond the M25 - I'm just saying that you could take advantage of one big Long Distance High Speed fleet to ensure interworking that provides the capacity where most needed)
