If the answer is "diverting XC to Scarborough" then I'm not too keen - fine if you want to save resources and cut the "via Leeds" services at York/Leeds (to use the freed up Voyagers elsewhere on the network - there's no need for six trains per hour from York to Newcastle) but you'd need the same number of Voyagers to run to Scarborough (both roughly an hour beyond York, so no units saved) plus you run into the complication of it being a lot harder for crews (at the moment XC staff can swap at Newcastle between the "via Leeds" and "via Doncaster" services).
What I
would be in favour of would be turning Scarborough - York into a half hourly shuttle from the bay platforms at the north east of York station, with a handful of through services to Leeds. You could probably time these every couple of hours, e.g. an eight o'clock swap over at York would mean that the westbound service arrived into Leeds at rush hour, a ten o'clock swap over at York would be good for the day tripper market in each direction, but keep the majority of services terminating at York to ensure that they run (given the problems caused by TPE's timetable and the number of services cut short at Malton in recent years, I think that a reliable service as far as York ought to be the focus, rather than the handful of people travelling all the way to Manchester/ Liverpool).
Same goes with a half hourly service from Teesside to York (combination of Sunderland and Middlesbrough services), but they don't
all need to run beyond York (there are plenty of connections at York for other places).
If I use an online planner to work out a route from Loughborough to Leeds it will tell me to change at Chesterfield instead of Sheffield, because the next train I need to catch will call at the same platform at Chesterfield whereas it could call or be waiting at any of five at Sheffield. But if my first train arrives Sheffield on P2 and the train out is on P3, P4 or arrives at P2 or P5 then I'm on the same island
This isn't correct. The data used by online journey planners doesn't contain any such information.
It/they might not *contain* any such information - it might not even be the result you got when you just tried it - but that was the result I always got. A human would say to change at Sheffield, it being the larger of the two. But a same-platform interchange at Chesterfield would take less time than the minimum interchange time at Sheffield (obviously). Are you sure that isn't coming into play?
This could be because the London - Sheffield trains (which presumably you are getting from Loughborough) have a few minutes of additional time allocated for the last section of the journey (i.e. Chesterfield to Sheffield) to ensure that they arrive on time. So your train might arrive at Chesterfield with enough time to give a connection to the one immediately behind it, but the couple of minutes of "padding" that the London train has as it arrives into Sheffield mean that the connection isn't valid at Sheffield? (I know I'll get into trouble for calling it "padding" btw)
I can't be certain at the moment, since the XC services aren't running, so the only things to compare the London trains against are the Northern services (which stop at Dronfield, so are slower) and the Liverpool services (which reverse at Sheffield), but that'd be my guess.
Could also be because journey planners either try to give people a connection at the first suitable place (i.e. they know that passengers who have to change trains would rather do so at the first available opportunity) or that they know that passengers would prefer to change at smaller stations (there were Cross Country adverts a few years ago encouraging people to change trains at Wolverhampton/ Cheltenham etc rather than the scrum of New Street, which must put a few people off. This doesn't explain why Derby doesn't come up as a suggestion though (unless your Leeds service was the ex-Nottingham one, which generally doesn't serve Derby?).
).