It's not often that you can say something good about British public transport, but this new…read morestation, opened in 2006, is one such place.
Built to replace the former Allerton and Garston stations, the new station provides an interchange between Merseyrail's Northern Line, running from Hunt's Cross to Southport, with the Liverpool-Warrington-Manchester and Liverpool-Runcorn-Crewe lines, as well as providing a major bus interchange for Liverpool Airport and other local services, and parking for 240 cars (already fully used) and secure storage for motor-cycles and bicycles.
The station is built on the sort of scale and quality we're not used to in Britain: the main building is bright and spacious, with a ticket office (for both bus and train services) and three disabled accessible toilets (token-operated, available from staff for free). The toilets are amazing, and talk to you while you are using them, telling you all about their features! The electronic timetable displays give details of bus and train departures, as well as flight arrivals and departures from the airport.
The building itself is environmentally sensitive, with a rainwater harvesting system, geothermal heat-pumps for heating and photovoltaic cells to generate electricity. There are no shop units in the station yet, nor a buffet facility, though these are apparently planned. The station is fully accessible, with lots of lifts. My only gripe with the facilities is that there is no heated waiting room on the platform - it can get pretty chilly on a windy February day!
The Northern line operates a 15-minute interval service on weekdays, half-hourly on Sunday. The Liverpool-Manchester service operates every 30 minutes, and that to Crewe and Birmingham every hour. Buses run to the airport and Liverpool City Centre every ten minutes. Unfortunately, neither the trains to London nor Norwich stop at the station - in the former case, frustratingly, because the platforms are too short.
But overall, this is a real asset for south Liverpool, and is currently used by over 5,000 passengers a day.