Suzeman, how I agree - the crying shame is that the rail track wasn't taken through the airport and a station installed at ema - the bottleneck is still the M1 roundabout which is congested at the best of time. Also a station at the airport would encourage more passengers and staff to use public transport to get to and from the airport and maybe alleviate congestion on the A453 which is a notoriously bad road for accidents.
A rail link direct to EMA will never happen. There are simply not the pax numbers to justify it. It would require a dedicated shuttle to Nottingham,Derby or Leicester and would prevent the through running from further afield. The inconvenience of a further change would detract from use.
IMO, the reason the shuttle to the Parkway failed was the high price - if going to one of the three cities (the main market), it was cheaper and faster to use the direct bus services. This may have been intentional to protect pax numbers on those services.
As regards airport site workers, there are 24 hour bus services from Nottingham, Derby, Loughborough and Leicester - a level of service rail simply cannot provide consistently due to engineering works. The public transport option is there. Rail needs concentrated demand to work (as does bus to a lesser extent) due to the large capital costs involved - a major worksite in basically green fields surrounded by three ciities does not provide this concentrated demand as people are drawn to employment from all points of the compass.
As regards another post about co-ordination at Derby, an hourly bus service will always be a compromise for connecting at a rail station, but (apart from Crewe and Matlock) most rail services from Derby are at least half hourly, so the connection time would not be that great. It also does not help that the rail industry has a habit of designing timetables around their own operational needs and not necessarily notifying others of their intentions too far in advance - I speak from experience of trying to plan bus connections in just such situations.
MD