Pick a station to see every place a direct train reaches from it — each with the train that arrives soonest. A later train can beat an earlier one (the 18:00 Preston→Euston arrives before the 17:18 if it's faster), so this ranks by arrival, not departure.
It answers a question ordinary journey planners are bad at. They want a destination before they will tell you anything, which is no help when what you actually want to know is where a station can take you — for a day out, for somewhere to live within a no-changes commute, or simply to avoid a connection you don't fancy on a Sunday.
Sorting departures is the obvious thing to do and it gives the wrong answer. Fast and slow trains share the same tracks, so a later train regularly overtakes an earlier one: if the 17:18 calls everywhere and the 18:00 runs fast, the 18:00 gets you there first despite leaving forty minutes later. Ranked by departure, the useful train is buried below one that is slower in every way that matters.
So the question this page answers is "what is the soonest I can be there", which is almost always the question you actually had. You can still sort by journey time or by destination name if you are looking at it a different way.
A destination appears here if one train takes you the whole way — you keep your seat and never change. That is a stricter test than journey planners apply, and it is the point: a connection that works perfectly on paper is still a connection, and on a Sunday with engineering work it is a risk you may not want.
Three caveats worth knowing. The answer is date-specific, because the timetable is: a station's direct destinations on a Tuesday and on a Sunday are different lists, sometimes dramatically. A direct train that runs once a day counts the same here as one that runs hourly, so a long list is not by itself a promise of a convenient service.
And trains that divide are under-reported. Where a service splits en route — the front portion to one destination, the rear to another — the timetable records the two halves as separate schedules tied together by an association record. We follow the schedule you board, so the destinations served by the other portion will not appear here even though you could reach them without changing trains, provided you were sat in the right half. Reading those association records is a known gap rather than a deliberate choice.
Need to change trains? The journey planner handles connections, and door-to-door adds buses and walking.