Manchester has 3 trains an hour to London, including substantially later evening services, with more direct trains to intermediate stations as a result. It has direct services to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Carlisle, Windermere, Lancaster, Blackburn, Burnley, Halifax, Bradford, Middlesbrough, Hull, Birmingham Airport, Coventry, Oxford, Reading, Southampton, Bournemouth, Gloucester, Bristol, Taunton, Exeter, Plymouth, Shrewsbury, Hereford, Newport, Cardiff, Swansea, Llandudno, Bangor and Holyhead.
So? Manchester is bigger than Liverpool. Manchester is more important than Liverpool, being arguably the second or third city in England, shuffling back and forth with Birmingham (well, the West Midlands as a whole). Liverpool is probably not even the third city.
There's also geography, or rather railway geography. Liverpool is basically at the end of a set of sort-of branch lines, while Manchester is well positioned for through services and is on the way from lots of places to lots of others. Liverpool is not on the way from anywhere to anywhere (other than small demands like West Lancashire to North Wales) - you have to need to run the service *to Liverpool* purely to serve Liverpool and its hinterland for it to be worthwhile.
Liverpool has 1 service per hour to London, considerably slower services to Birmingham (despite these being the way the city's residents are supposed to travel to everywhere south and east of Brum, except London), and direct services to none of the places I've listed (with only a handful in the pipeline). If I remember rightly, a recent survey found that only Bradford is worse-served among major cities. What logical reason is there why Liverpool, which is not actually that much smaller than Manchester, receives so mich worse provision ?
Manchester jealously again? I don't get the inferiority complex. Indeed, I really find it grates. The incessant whining of being badly done by makes some of the more vocal inhabitants of my birth city just sound like, well, whiners. It makes people ignore them. It makes people dislike the place. The city will just never move on the world scale until it stops it and starts being positive.
The people of Liverpool are not badly done by, not in any form. Try living somewhere really deprived like parts of the South Wales Valleys, somewhere like Blaenau Ffestiniog, parts of Middlesbrough etc. Liverpool, by and large, has nothing on them. And Manchester of course has its ratholes.
It's because of geography, primarily, not because someone has it in for Liverpool. They really don't. Genuinely.
People like me, who live in Liverpool but have to travel frequently, find life more difficult than if they lived somewhere better served.
If living in Liverpool does not suit your travel patterns, then why not consider moving to a city that does? You wouldn't live in Manchester and commute daily to London (unless a very rich insomniac). Why live somewhere that is unsuitable for your travel needs?
In any case, now they've poshed it up, changing at New St really isn't a trial. It nicely breaks your journey up and has a good selection of retail to pick something up. I chose to do so this evening, quite willingly, I could instead have gone down the Trent Valley but didn't.
That's not having a chip on your shoulder, that's pointing out an actual substantial difficulty which arises from living in one place rather than another. Like many people who have moved away from Liverpool, you may be reluctant to argue for better treatment for the city for fear of people waving their hands at you and telling you 'eh calm down, calm down', but that doesn't make the situation any fairer or more logical.
FWIW I travel to the city quite often, I was there this weekend, all my immediate family live in or around it. But for the replacement bus service from Crewe, I was quite happy with the £29.something walk-up super off peak return in exchange for a slightly slower service.
