Corby to Oakham and beyond is a non-starter. EMT only run services that way to retain crew knowledge for diversion.
The time penalty of running via Oakham is significant. To give an example Kettering - East Midlands Parkway, via Leicester is a 41 minute journey, via Melton and Oakham is 1h 12m
This really needs repeating.
You could run London - Kettering - Leicester - East Midlands Parkway - Nottingham (i.e. serving a fairly large city) *or* you could take half an hour longer and serve nowhere of comparable size to Leicester... but the half hour time penalty will probably mean getting overtaken by two other London - Nottingham trains (that ran via Leicester). Essentially there'd be no point, unless you were going to dump hundreds of bargain basement fares... which isn't the best use of a path out of St Pancras when we can fill trains with regular fare-payers.
As for the rest of this thread:
Why the obsession with avoiding big places? I can see the point in some Liverpool - Norwich services avoiding Sheffield to save ten minutes (albeit you'd need to find replacement Manchester - Sheffield and Sheffield - Nottingham services), but there's no discernible time advantage in running Nottingham - Burton to avoid Derby, Kettering - East Midlands Parkway to avoid Leicester... Liverpool to Nottingham to avoid Manchester... it's a bit too contrary for me.
If your plan for new routes involves building additional stations and splitting/joining services then it's probably far too complicated/ unrealistic
If your plan for new routes involves crossing the WCML at Crewe then you can probably forget it - if the long established Manchester - Cardiff service struggles to get a path over the flat crossings then I wouldn't build up too much hope for things like Liverpool - Stoke. Same goes for additional Nottingham - Lincoln services of the flat ECML crossing.
If your plan for new routes involves convoluted routes (e.g. Derby to Leicester
via Nottingham, for the sake of giving everywhere a direct service to everywhere) then forget about it. Not everywhere a hundred miles apart can have a direct service - leave those kind of minor markets to National Express. Maybe large places should have a direct service to other large places within a "fifty mile" radius, but the number of people doing journeys like Liverpool to Leicester or Corby to Glasgow each day are going to be a rounding error, in the grand scheme of things.
IF your plan for new routes involves linking St Pancras to Settle then... I have no words. Please make it stop! (at least it's better than the St Pancras - Bakewell - Manchester plans, I guess?)
Actually, there are four services per hour between Derby and Birmingham. One from the South West to Scotland, one from Reading or Southampton to Newcastle, one from Cardiff Central to Nottingham and one from Birmingham New Street to Nottingham. If I remember correctly there used to be a 5th - it went to Matlock
Ah, the short-lived Central Trains service... a reaction to Virgin (XC) doubling their Derby - Birmingham service (at the time of Operation Princess)... so Central Trains introduced a third service of their own onto the corridor... turning a route that had survived with three trains an hour into one that now had five trains an hour... whether this is the kind of "competition" that people want or is a waste of scarce resources is another story, I guess!
