My local transit authority is making a fairly major change to its regional rail system. Without boring you with all the history, roughly speaking, a few decades ago they connected up the two "sides" of the system. Part of the motivation was so that they could create more suburb-to-suburb routes, with each line going inbound into the city from one outer suburb, and then back out to another outer suburb. Whatever the merits of this idea, in recent years changing train routing needs have meant that a lot of trains aren't actually one seat rides from one outer suburb to another, and the trains change their route designations when they hit the city.
So they're going back to a pure hub and spoke system now. I'm not entirely sure why train routing needs required a lot of trains to change rout designations, but presumably this does provide for some additional flexibility in changing train frequencies. For example, it might make it easier to run relatively more outbound trains at night, or perhaps have more trains which only travel a truncated route, providing greater frequencies over shorter segments.
All very exciting!!
