Yeah, the cancellation of the hourly Gainsborough service is a sneaky reduction by the Operator of Last Resort (on top of the other ones that have affected South Yorkshire like Doncaster to Scunthorpe/ Sheffield to Cleethorpes/ over half the Sheffield to Doncaster stoppers etc)
Sheffield to Lincoln is an annoying duration, it’s over 1h20 so would be tough to run an hourly service with just three trains, which partly explains why it’s generally been tagged into other services (including the good old Serco “Scunthorpe - Sheffield - Lincoln - Sheffield - Adwick - Sheffield - Scunthorpe diagrams!). You could speed it up by omitting local stops west of Worksop but that’d mean reintroducing the Gainsborough stopper (see above)
Platform seventeen at Leeds is a frustrating one, there’s three pairs of double track lines through the station and TPE generally have the southern pair themselves so that means that Woodlesford services are either restricted to platform seventeen or have to clash with other routes on the flat crossings to access other platforms
I’ve suggested before that the “solution” would be a half hourly Sheffield - Barnsley - Leeds semi-fast (one stopping at Darton, the other at Normanton) which worked onto a half hourly Leeds - Castleford - Knottingley service…
The idea being that you could run these as the/four coach trains since the four paths at Leeds could be spaced apart (e.g. an eight minute turnaround for the Sheffield - Leeds - Knottingley diagram then a seven minute gap then a Knottingley - Leeds - Sheffield diagram has eight minutes to reverse there then a gap then…)
(The Sheffield - Castleford - Leeds stopper would be replaced by a Sheffield - Barnsley stopper, Darton and Normanton calls picked up by the “semi fast”, the Wakefield to Castleford link provided by the Huddersfield service, the Castleford - Leeds service provided by the improved Knottingley frequency)
However this would rely on some things that I’d previously taken for granted, like Northern to run the services that Arriva signed up to, including the “fast” Sheffield to Leeds service that’s so necessary to relieve the pressure on the XC service and maintaining links like Huddersfield to Castleford
But unless something radical happens, we look destined to struggle on with the half hourly Castleford stoppers and the half hourly Sheffield “semi fast” trains sharing a single four coach platform at Leeds whilst other corridors have much more capacity at the same station - which means no scope to improve the majority of Sheffield to Barnsley trains because the “tail” is wagging the “dog”… what’s the alternative though? It’ll be a struggle just to get the Operator of Last Resort back to the “Old” timetable without being greedy and expecting them to actually improve things!
(Maybe our only hope is something unrealistic like the Nottingham - S&C - Glasgow express which would at least mean some extra capacity at Barnsley!)