A few comments (that I may have made before, because, let's face it, we've had this discussion before, and will continue to do so until someone takes a proper decision about XC)
XC is always going to be a tough set of routes - they generally need subsidy - they overlap with lots of other franchises (and therefore can't be easily tweaked given the fixed paths through various junctions etc) - they don't sit neatly into one region so aren't a political priority - it's always going to play second fiddle to either "Express London Services That Are Used By Lots Of MPs" or "Shorter Services That Stay Within A Region And Therefore Regional Politicians/ Representatives Have More 'Ownership' Of"
Most of the blame lies with the Government(s) - the franchise has had short term extension after short term extension - that's not Arriva's fault
HS2 has been a great excuse for Westminster to sit on their hands here - why take radical action to XC and upset people when HS2 will "fix" the Birmingham to Manchester/ Leeds services in only ten years time?
The need for fast accelerating trains capable of running at 125mph means that there's not a lot of scope for replacing Voyagers with anything else (you can take the similar trains from Avanti and EMR, of course, but replacement of the existing trains seems off the menu) - you aren't going to be able to rewrite the paths through various bottlenecks just to allow them to run your favourite trains (obligatory 442s reference etc)
Please nobody suggest cascading 125mph trains with end doors and terrible seating arrangements on the ex-Central CityLink routes, or introducing new services to Liverpool/Brighton etc (too late, I know...)
Similarly, worrying about taking trains out of action to fiddle about with the seats seems a bit of a luxury given that we need as many units in service each day as possible
Ideally I'd prioritise a regular EMU from Manchester to Birmingham over the smaller number of passengers doing through journeys to Bournemouth/ Bristol etc but that relies on platform space at New Street/ sufficient electricity supplies/ annoying the kind of people who prefer long distance links over having lots of seats on the kind of shorter distances that passengers are more likely to do on a typical day
Not all of these problems are XCs to "solve". Princess made XC the "default" TOC on a number of markets where it previously only had a smaller presence (e.g. there were only three trains per day from Edinburgh to Newcastle which were more about getting HSTs to/from Craigentinny). RRNE used to run a Leeds - Westgate - Meadowhall - Sheffield service every couple of hours (that occasionally extended to Dronfield/Chesterfield) but gave it up when Voyagers started running hourly from Leeds to Sheffield - similarly RRNW used to run services from Manchester to Birmingham - SWT from Reading to Winchester - GNER dropped the Doncaster stop on a number of Newcastle/ Edinburgh services leaving XC to handle much of the Doncaster - York/ Newcastle passengers - GNER similarly dropped the daytime services to Glasgow Central meaning anyone from Clydeside to Newcastle/ York switched to XC - there's no reason why other TOCs can't step up in certain areas where XC struggles to meet demand, as TPE later did between Leeds to Newcastle and GWR are doing with HSTs from Bristol to Exeter and Arriva's Northern franchise promised to do for Leeds - Sheffield - don't assume that only XC can solve these problems. If GWR extended some of their London - Reading - Oxford services to Banbury then that'd provide opportunities between the Thames Valley and West Midlands by changing onto Chiltern services
I've suggested before (and will continue to suggest) that XC focus more on the "core" (roughly York/ Manchester to Bristol/ Reading) - I'm not saying that they give up on the extremities but under the pre-Covid timetable there were a lot of Voyagers operating beyond the core at any one time. To provide one daily train per day from Aberdeen to Birmingham means a Voyager spending around eleven hours a day north of Edinburgh (which must be a real hassle in terms of staffing to provide just one train a day - given that you need the route knowledge, the awkward diagrams etc).
Lastly, someone probably needs to have a difficult conversation about what XC services should focus on - it can be fine for a train to be a mix of different passenger types (the person travelling hundreds of miles might be sat next to half a dozen other people at different times as the service sees a turnover of various short distance passengers on the adjacent seat) - but is it worth providing more seats on the "core" if it means significantly reducing the number of through trains from Edinburgh to Plymouth? Is it better if we can attract a few more people to abandon cars to do journeys of around an hour if it means losing half the Edinburgh to Plymouth market to air? Or do we keep pretending that we can serve every market at the same time with no compromises?
