Euston is a terrible example anyway as WCML trains are totally misloaded and will only get worse in December with the proposed changes making the slightly slower alternative option a lot slower and therefore making more people aim for the prime trains...
I haven't seen the proposed train lengths, but if the "prime" trains are all 12-car south of Northampton I think it will
likely be absolutely fine. Also note that Avanti are changing which of their trains call at MKC to provide a more evenly spread service (at present southbound even with a full service it may as well be hourly as they're all crammed into about a 12 minute period) so the "prime trains" will be relieved slightly by people using Avanti instead which is presently very unattractive.
One thing I think they
should do, though, is potentially do more with the peak extras. It is planned to be 2 more Trings, which is fine in itself, but doesn't add capacity to Leighton, Bletchley, MKC, Wolverton or Northampton. So my view would be that the "peak extra" pattern should follow the early-2000s post VHF peak approach which was roughly to extend the xx06/xx36 Tring stoppers to MKC, the xx24/xx54 MKC semifasts to Northampton and to add 2 further Tring stoppers at xx10/xx40. If there
is an overcrowding problem on the fasts I think they will end up doing that or part of it anyway - it was well tested and apart from a few trains which really needed to be 12 rather than 8-car (but were constrained by the length of P9/10) it worked.
(One of the oddest aspects of the WCML peak timetable pre-COVID was what happened to that 1824, which was one of the problem trains, particularly when it was the evening peak semifast Crewe after Northampton. I'd for years thought it should be 12-car, but in the end what they did was split it in half, running an 1820 and an 1829 which basically skip stopped with almost no stops in common - I forget what they were overall but the 1829 did Bletchley but not the 1820, one did Apsley and the other Kings Langley etc - in essence fixing the issue by running a 16-car train in that path but in two bits)
In principle yes I’d agree, huge fan of standard hour timetables where they are appropriate. But take for example the GEML, or Southeastern, which from a commuter perspective are far more difficult to plan than the WCML simply because of the number of passengers
But isn't that number of passengers considerably reduced, as GE and SE are mostly commuter operations? That number of passengers is why the WCML lost its pattern as I described above, and is similarly why it'll now work to put it back.
In essence we're not talking about complex patterns, we're just talking about not running some or all of the peak extras on Mon/Fri - in essence, running a Saturday timetable.