It is a significant change that onetime nonstops have picked up a range of intermediate stops, and are thus no faster (and occasionally a bit slower) than long ago, for individual departures. This not only improves service to intermediate points, and indeed between them, but also is allied with much enhanced frequency. I notice that when travelling on business trips from London to much of the country, I no longer time meetings to individual return trips, but just set off home when adequately finished, much as I do when travelling by car. This even applies to points as far away as Newcastle or Carlisle (I go to both). It has actually made the service much more useful than knocking 15 minutes off the time of the occasional prestige nonstop. I also sometimes go to Doncaster, where far more services now stop than before. That has completely surpassed going by car.
The various prestige highest speed services of past times, whether Flying Scotsman or Cornish Riviera, typically did late morning departures, and were your principal occupation of the day. Likewise the big long-haul cross-country operations like the Liverpool-Plymouth. The world has moved on; I can't recall the last late morning long distance train I took, but there have been plenty at 0730 or 1830. Edinburgh to Taunton, of my youthful times, on a specific daily through service to Paignton introduced in 1973, which I amused the Edinburgh booking clerk by calling it the "Torbay Express", is now hourly all day.
The London to Bristol service, with the various routes that merge in with it along the way, has essentially become an outer suburban operation. When the service was reduced after lockdown, it was the recently-introduced nonstop trains that didn't come back.
