RE: Express rail links from Cities to airports

Some facts:

Over a 50 year period until the advent of easyJet, Manchester grew, Liverpool didn’t.

Manchester is at the centre of a road/rail/air hub. Liverpool is out on a limb.

Carriers only go to Liverpool when they get access for next to nothing. The sad truth is that the whole infrasructure of Merseyside has been a mess since the end of the 1960s and the airport cannot generate enough paying traffic to offer the extensive service even a regional airport needs today.

The sensible thing would have been for Manchester to have bought
Speke, built a rail link between the two and kept he scheduled business in Manchester and moved if not all, the charter traffic
to Liverpool, with free access both ways.

Of course local politics and pride stopped this.