Nostalgia is a funny old beast. The fact that Marathon and Opal Fruits changed name become touchstone cultural references for people of a certain generation, despite hundreds of other products changing their name.
It's similarly interesting to me which services become similarly remembered whilst others fade away. Of the services introduced post-privatisation and subsequently withdrawn, Leeds - Settle - Glasgow seems to have had a huge impact, for a service that was just a daily 156. Anything involving Liverpool seems to be much higher profile than services scrapped from other cities. London - Tonbridge - Kent. But plenty of other services slip off the radar without anyone demanding they be reinstated.
Did the Liverpool Lime Street [LIV] to Norwich [NRW] service exist under British Rail?
Liverpool-Norwich has been roughly in the form of the current hourly service since about 1991/1992.
There was a roughly hourly "core" from Ely to Stockport (some from Ipswich/ Stansted/ Cambridge/ Norwich... some via Nottingham and some via Loughborough... some avoiding Sheffield... some through Manchester Piccadilly to Liverpool, some through Manchester Victoria to Blackpool/ Cumbria).
Over the years it solidified into a fairly clock face hourly service from Norwich to Liverpool (via Nottingham and Sheffield).As with many other lines, there's a trade off between a simple reliable clock face service to limited destinations and a complicated service to a variety of destinations.
If I remember correctly the Waterloo -South Wales service reversed at. Newport to head for Manchester Piccadilly.
Certainly not all of them - there were some Waterloo services to/from West Wales and I have a memory of one Waterloo service running onto a "Valley Lines" station (I mean Valley Lines in terms of the original franchise, not just the lines through Queen Street... it could have been Maesteg?)