A lot of the problems lie in tracks and their maintenance, and the tracks were re-nationalised many years ago. It is not efficiently run (see HS2!).
They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid. Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Their ability and willingness to strike affects both costs and people's willingness to rely on public transport.
The big constraint is lack of subsidies. it probably makes little difference whether the system is privately owned but tightly regulated, or publicly owned so much as willingness to subsidise it. This is also shown by the failure of franchises taken back into public ownership to improve.
The problem was more that - in typical privatised fashion - the industry was treated as a cash grab, and property speculation and other side quests got more management attention than running a safe railway.
That first incarnation was so bad it was quickly nuked, and replaced with the hybrid arrangement we have today, which has a much better safety record, but is still comically expensive and inefficient.
And franchises very clearly have improved, so that's incorrect too. Delays and cancellations are down across the network, and that's before the system is reintegrated.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2025/oct...
The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge. The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.
This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.
That's always the loss. In privitisation, in out-sourcing, and in downscaling engineering teams by firing senior engineers. And it's great for the those in charge of the budget cuts, because it is a loss that is very difficult to quantify financially, and will only show over a longer period of time. Typically, well after they cashed-out and left.
IMHO most executive pay should be locked up for decades by law, and they only get a middle-class wage stipend in the interim. And I mean really locked up, such that a significant fraction should only be payed out as long as 20 years later. And that pay gets forfeited if the organization has too many problems.
It'd help disincentive smash-and-grab management like you describe (because weakening the org would jeopardize the locked up pay, and would help a big with succession (because their pay would depend on the successor's performance, too).
Otherwise bloated, inefficient companies look the same as those retaining institutional knowledge.
I don't however remember the conclusion!
I've tracked down the article to https://academic.oup.com/jrssig/article-abstract/4/1/15/7029... but I don't have access.
> The conclusion from the analysis of the accident data is that there is no evidence for the hypothesis that railway safety, as measured by accidents, has become worse since privatisation.
https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j....
Since 2002, there has only been a single passenger fatality attributable to poor maintenance: the Grayrigg derailment in 2007.
This followed a cluster of high profile crashes during the Railtrack (privatisation) era in 1997-2002 that killed dozens, and were directly or partly attributable to poor maintenance.
I’d argue that the longer Network Rail’s good safety record continues, the more we can disregard that article.
Suspiciously specific denial. What about other metrics?
Given where it was published (a magazine backed by statisticians associations in three countries) it would have been very damaging to the author's (a professor at Imperial College) reputation to have been sloppy about conclusions.
def is_problem(ctx) -> Bool:
...1000 lines of various garbage...
def is_specific_condition(ctx) -> Bool:
...3 lines of specific predicate...
Followed closely by safety-involved “incidents” that were reportable somewhere (internally or to a regulator), but that luckily didn’t result in an accident that time.
One imagines these must get really hard to measure reliably the further they get from concrete death records.
This makes no sense as a criticism of "as measured by accidents". The fix for measuring by accidents is to measure by accidents?
>The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.
Yeah, this is often the biggest loss of mass layoffs in the name of short term profits. Esepcially since the situations also tend to cut training programs. You're slashing a pipe for some quick water at the cost of draining the rest of your plumbing system. while firing the plumbers in the process.
I wish we could switch back to incentivizing long term portfolios and planning. It's reckless at this point.
It wasn't given away. Fiat Ferroviaria purchased the patents for it.
Mind, the UK wasn't the first tilted train (that would probably be PERC in the US) or even the first actively tilted train (either SNCF in France or Deutsche Bahn in Germany).
This all happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, long before privatisation.
British Rail itself decided that the APT tilting trains were too risky/radical, and shifted to a more conventional design, the HST.
And the Italians had been working on their own successful tilting technology for years before they bought the APT patents in 1982.
The basic fact about rail privatization is captured in this chart. All else is commentary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
Any facts taken from that chart need to be extremely caveated.
Or maybe, just maybe, there's another underlying casual relationship that explains why train use increased a ton in the 90s and 00s in both countries (and other European countries too, by the way, AFAIK passengers count also increased in Germany in that period). Who knows.
This alone would have been responsible for a big increase in French rail traffic.
UK rail infrastructure certainly received improvements during this era too, but besides HS1 it was mostly just renewing and upgrading existing tracks. Nothing like the thousands of km of new high speed rail that was built in France!
Also TGV is nice, but it doesn't explain why TER and Intercité (the two slower-speed regional networks) also experienced an influx of passengers during the period.
It's not TGV, it's not privatization and it is not Wiedervereinigung, it's a broader trend.
I don't entirely disagree with you, but rail lines don't function in isolation. If you introduce a new high speed main line, there is a network effect: connecting services will also see a boost in traffic from people travelling on other lines to reach the new one.
Lurking in the background the whole time was the RMT, the National Union of Rail [etc.] Workers, led by "communist/socialist" Bob Crow, a moderate in the union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Crow
So if this is viewed as an experiment in private ownership, experimental conditions were extremely messy and any conclusions are invalidated by cultural complexities and compromises.
No kidding.
But of course, never underestimate the motivated reasoning of an HN user. After all, somebody made money off of the privatization. That could've been you, and you like making money, right?
It's a question of perspective. I've spent my life in countries where I've seen my taxes being spent relatively well, I feel the benefits of it daily both as a private citizen and a founder. Everywhere I've lived, when transport, utilities, healthcare and education, even part of the media, were publicly managed, they were simply better and cheaper.
But I understand that this is not universal and that most governments don't operate effectively for their taxpayers. And that, yes, if the whole system is set up for it, private solutions can also thrive and be superior. I suppose it's hard to privatize public services effectively in an ecosystem that doesn't support private enterprise as much.
Companies with workers on their boards are significantly less likely to go bust than companies where only investors' opinions matter.
But of course, whenever someone else's opinion matters, investors use their wealth to try to change that. Rich people seem to prefer worse outcomes as long as they get to be in charge.
For most established companies it is really not much of a challenge to prevent it from going bust if that is your priority, but it requires sacrifices, mostly opportunity costs.
You mention constructs to check power? What do you mean?
So yes, I'd consider them rich. If you can totally stop working for more than 5 years I'd say you are rich.
At that point you start trying to accumulate power instead of money, and of course money is a by-product for power.
Interestingly, Quebec in Canada has been loosely following this model recently and it's working great. Long video but interesting if you like infrastructure stuff:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlHqqA0onn0&t=532s
TLDR: CDPQ invests on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan, and has been building infra on behalf of the pension plan across Quebec (and Canada) to great success comparatively.
Speaking only for myself, I would be okay with a lower return if it also means we as a society have good public transit, roads that aren't more pothole than asphalt, water that doesn't have to be boiled on occasion, reliable power, modern internet, and so on.
Would you get the same net result if you put the money in an index fund and then bought the infrastructure? That's the actual comparison.
Becoming more common in the US too, because of Trump's policy of US re-industrialization and national security. Intel Corp (10% equity), MP Materials (15%), Lithium Americas(5%), Trilogy Metals (17.5%), US Steel (golden share), Vulcan Elements, ReElement Technologies
Solyndra $500M loan guarantee (defaulted 2011)
Tesla $500M loan (repaid early 2013 with interest)
First Solar $3B loan guarantees (currently being serviced)
SunPower $1.2B loan guarantee (bankrupt 2024 but loan repaid)
ARRA (2009) $25.6B grants disbursed
0. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/e...
Depending on who he is doing favours to, it looks right-wing or left-wing under the traditional political lens, but it's more about Trump doing whatever he wants with the governments resources.
This is in fact the situation in major parts of the UK rail network now; much has been renationalised or has the DoT as sole shareholder.
The UK rail system is not now truly privately held; this has been slowly unpicked by both the previous Conservative government and the current Labour government.
Last year, we had the absurd spectacle of the Department for Transport notifying the Department for Transport that the Department for Transport had breached their contract with the Department for Transport, because the Department for Transport didn't meet the performance standards set by the Department for Transport.
People like to complain about public systems as if problems wouldn't exist in privately owned ones.
In other conversations it’s widely argued that those four probably don’t map very well to the larger, more diverse in every way, Western Democracies.
That leaves Germany, which has its problems.
If Germany hadn’t shut down their nuclear power plants they could have had 94% low emissions electricity by now, rather than 64% and much more costly.
The German economy is so well managed they’ve introduced rent-control in some cities.
Absolute paragon of a Western Democracy!
Maybe there’s an argument to be made that large countries should be broken up in to smaller, more manageable geographic / population sizes.
Trust busting style.
This is in fact an interesting by-product of privatisation: train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them. They consequently became more expensive. A somewhat fun side effect of the free market, especially given the prevailing assumption that moving public sector employees into the private sector would drive down their pay and conditions.
In one very small way I actually sympathise on the railways, let me be specific, this is a long story:
The person driving the train clearly needs to learn how to drive that particular model of train, I think that's likely true basically everywhere. The UK's railway systems are however also reliant on drivers knowing the route. A driver must be familiar with exactly the rails their train will pass over to get from A to B, knowing what to expect ahead for some distance at all times. So it's possible that Jim, who is sat in a coffee room right now can drive a 450, but he doesn't know the Waterloo to Portsmouth via Southampton crazy bypass that's in place due to track work, so he is not able to drive the Portsmouth train that's right there, full of passengers and will now instead be cancelled because the scheduled driver did not arrive. In many of the world's railway systems route knowledge is not crucial (it might be good but it's not required).
However, because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding-ding,_and_away the modern rulebook also requires that the Guard have route knowledge. In contrast to the driver this is much less valuable, but it means that now your Portsmouth train maybe has to be cancelled because although the driver intended was available or the standby could do your route, the only available Guard knows the ordinary Portsmouth route, not the weird one.
I think this is a situation where we should fix systems instead rather than hoping that route knowledge for guards makes it work. But this means the guard is arguably de-skilled and less valuable than before.
I suspect the move from public to private ownership did adversely affect the upgrades of those, as well as electrification on several key routes.
If I remember correctly they do not even have something as basic as an electronic coursebook - which became mandatory in Germany in the 90s already. And at least in NL if you have a set of routes in a certain direction / route set - drivers would get route familiarization both for the main routes and for the bypasses.
It should also be made clear that you don't need to get an actual qualification from a bureaucratic org. You basically just need to document the last time the driver drove the route with another qualified driver and then document that they've kept the qualification up to date. It's a documentation process and just not that onerous. Also absolutely required for any railway since trains don't stop or accelerate quickly. You need the drivers to know what's coming ahead and no amount of signage or signalling can beat knowing the route.
The only concern i have is the guard qualification. That does seem overboard but... i don't know the UK and chances are there's nuance to this. So i'd have concern with anyone reading GPs post and thinking this is the cause of UKs railway inefficiency.
It’s not particularly onerous and understandably helpful for vehicles that take a long time to adjust speed.
The guard requirement does seem unnecessary though and is not a universal practice globally.
In daylight there are speed signs but, trains accelerate and brake much more slowly than your car, so while they're a useful reminder you cannot correctly drive the train based on observing these signs. At night you may not see them at all.
Then does your route diverge? In some cases the intent to diverge is signalled, unlike speed, Flashing double yellow for example means "Prepare to find the next signal at: Prepare to find the next signal at danger" plus "Your route will diverge". However you really need to prepare some distance in advance of this information anyway in some cases, so you need to know, long before the signals and certainly long before being able to actually see it, that you will make a turn.
The UK also has unsignalled stations - places where a passenger train will ordinarily stop, and must obey signals, but there are no starting signals, so you need to remember whether you were under a cautionary signal say five minutes ago, which still applies now, even though meanwhile a dog escaped, some idiot threw yoghurt at people and then two hundred soccer fans boarded your train.
The "Driver's Reminder Appliance" is meant to help with this last part, it's basically just a button you can push, to remind you that you pushed the button and restore your mental state...
Did the time it takes trains to accelerate and brake change recently? The time it takes to accelerate and brake should have been considered when placing the signs in the first place.
Frankly, something like positive train control or the European Train Control System should be table stakes at this point. It should be difficult or impossible for a driver unfamiliar with a route to cause a crash.
This is a question that's occurred to me in a different context. In Shanghai, there are subway stations where the passenger area is separated from the tracks by a floor-to-ceiling wall, making it impossible to drop something onto the tracks, fall onto the tracks, or get pushed onto the tracks.
There are also stations where there's no wall, and anyone can just shove you onto the tracks at any time.
The presence of a wall is highly predictable: newer stations have them, and older stations don't.
Should the older stations be renovated? That would be an increase in safety. It would also be a pretty substantial expense to address a mostly nonexistent problem. The wall is a good idea and it makes sense to include it when you're constructing a new station. But that doesn't mean it makes sense to add it to an existing station.
(I would also mindfully say that there is a lot of subtle political propaganda in the UK around this issue- the powers that be want the public to blame train drivers for the failures of privatisation)
Companies may or may not handle strikes properly. If it were that easy, industrial interests (and their emissaries, like Reagan and Thatcher) would not have spent more than a century trying to break unions.
> train drivers became rarer due to shareholder reluctance to train and recruit them
Are you arguing that it's grown more powerful with that change?
They won't kill you or rough you up, but they will tell you what your assessment will find. And reiterate that they are at your house, where your family lives.
In that case, there's no obstacle. This is exactly what happened with containerization, and guess what? The ports that did containerize, including some ports constructed from scratch specifically because existing unionized ports blocked containerization, replaced the ports that didn't.
So sure, there's no big deal, just pay the mob. People do argue for that.
So I have a guideline of good faith: you can hire me and I don’t mind doing it for you; or you can go read up on the subject, reach some understanding of what these things are, and we can discuss; or you can go do some research of equivalent value to me and bring that to me as a barter[0].
Otherwise, it’s really not a big deal to me if you don’t believe something that’s true.
0: for the moment, I’m willing to trade for the DNA height model that some people claim exists. If you can find it for me, I’ll find you some sources for container royalties.
Not really sure why people like moaning about train drivers. Are they jealous a train driver is making more than them? While in the case of tech workers they sit quietly and watch their £65k jobs go to India.
This is much more like blackmail than doing right by the working man.
Did the train drivers somehow not have this power before privatization?
Yes and that's as it should be, a fully loaded high speed intercity train has more souls on board than most commercial aviation planes (apologies pet peeve of mine because our media keeps banging on about how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid).
A bad day at the office for me is I break production and cost the company some money, a bad day at the office for them is considerably more serious - it's a lot of responsibility.
An automated train is better for everyone. So if your system doesn't have it they should be investing in getting it.
In some cases you need safety people at the platforms, or on the train, but their only useful control is the stop/go button.
The better answer is do maintenance such that you don't have those failures in the first place.
That's the kind of thing that is hard to automate because while you can automate any routine operation (eventually) it's the none routine things that get you.
Planes and Trains have both had increasing levels of automation for decades and that's fantastic, humans are flawed/get tired/get distracted but you still need a human in the loop who can decide what to do when the unknown/unexpected happens and for that human to be effective they need to be able to operate large parts of the vehicle without the automation and understand the basic principles of the system as a whole well enough to decide what they should do that won't make the situation worse.
In planes that's the Pilot in Command, in Trains it's the driver.
For example, I've been on a Glasgow bound train where the driver was instructed to pass the signal at danger following a lengthy signoff process. Some scallywags had stolen wire for copper.
Until the manufacturer puts DRM in your fucking train: https://www.thedrive.com/news/hackers-beat-anti-repair-softw...
If the train driver falls asleep and the train is about to go where it shouldn't, then safety systems should kick in and halt the train automatically. This is not possible (to the same extent) in airplanes.
A train will likely always need to be manned, there are, in fact, checks that have to be made by a person and can't be made by a computer.
However, it seems like the part of actually driving the train could be nearly completely automated. The train is on a rail, about the only thing a person is needed for when the train is in motion is to push a stop button if things go wrong. Things like speed and indeed even a decent amount of visual checks could be automated based on location.
I'm against trams because a bus can do the same thing - and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable.
Yeah, that's not realistic in 99% of the cases.
> I'm against trams because a bus can do the same thing - and if you maintain the roads to track standards they are just as comfortable.
But buses can't do the same thing.
The thing about LRT is capacity per driver. Even the fanciest, most expensive buses can take maybe half the passengers a standard 30-40m tram can. It's not even a competition. That alone makes trams win every time there's enough population to fill that capacity. Even if you wanted to pay for three bus drivers rather than one tram driver, you can simply not put enough buses on the same route to make up for the difference. Even if said route is independent of other traffic, which it never ever is.
Rail transport always has high up-front costs but low operating costs. But a BRT system truly designed to rail standards would cost almost as much as just building a frigging LRT system. And if you do the sensible thing and choose overhead rather than battery power – well, there's a reason trolleybus rapid transit systems do not actually exist. There's zero reasons you'd want such a thing rather than light rail.
Trams benefit greatly from being mature technology with economies of scale. There's a lot of knowledge in the world on how to build great rail infrastructure and how to make great LRT vehicles at a scale. There are maybe two companies in the world that make BRT vehicles, and no matter how excellent the infrastructure, the service lifespan of a bus is less than half that of a tram.
There also exists this thing called "rail factor". No matter how fancy your bus system, an equivalent thing but on rails will always attract more passengers, especially from demographics that would otherwise not use transit. Whatever the reason, this effect can not be ignored given how important it is to attract new transit users. Steel on steel is simply always more popular than rubber on pavement when it comes to transit.
the 'rail factor' is claimed often - but I've never seen it put to a fair test. When you give the train better service of course people choose to use it.
In the UK, I had to take a train from Preston England to London (2004ish). It was absolutely packed. A good reason for that is the ticket price was about 60 gbp and the trip took 3 hours (IIRC).
That's where I think the US should both invest and subsidize. There's a lot of air travel that could be replaced with rail travel if the US rail wasn't so terribly ran. It usually costs more than an airline ticket (which is crazy) and often takes a lot longer due to delays waiting on commercial trains. A lot of that can be fixed by regulating commercial rail shipping (for example, limiting train length). But also building new dedicated highspeed lines between major metros. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to make a trip from Seattle to Florida in under 48h by rail and for less than $500.
A train should be cheaper and faster than a car. It should be cheaper than a plane.
i use amtrak once in a while, but I hate driving and still can only justify it because my body can't sit in a car that long without pain
EDIT: Oh, I think I understand what you mean. If I've got my understanding correct then my response is that noir_lord said that one of the crabs shouldn't be climbing out:
> their pay is fair for the responsibility
It is what it is with some people.
> in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
that train drivers and pilots are fairly paid, whereas everyone else is underpaid?
Many people are well-paid, or even overpaid. CEOs, for instance.
It's just that most people, in most common professions, are underpaid.
It only makes sense to talk about a blanket statement like that being a "contradiction" when someone is attempting to speak in the language of formal logic or detailed argument, not colloquial speech.
Then I would have replied that, despite perhaps being true, I don't how it's relevant to the question of whether it's fair to pay train drivers and pilots the same.
What is inconsistent about those two things?
You can simultaneously believe that train drivers and airline pilots deserve to be paid more.
But that's not what noir_lord thinks. He/she specifically said
> their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid [my emphasis]
which implies that train drivers are currently paid the correct amount.
> how "overpaid" train drivers are when in reality their pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
You are the one who is implying something.
Maybe I am, so let's stick to exactly what noir_lord said
> > Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots
> that's as it should be
I understand this to mean that it is fair that train drivers are paid as much as airline pilots.
> in reality their [train drivers'] pay is fair for the responsibility it's everyone else who is underpaid
I understand this to mean that train drivers are paid fairly, and everyone else, including pilots, are underpaid, i.e. it is not fair that airline pilots don't earn more than they currently do, i.e. as much as train drivers, from which I conclude that it is not fair that train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots, in contradiction to the first claim.
Where have I gone wrong?
I must be an engineer for a different Network Rail
Train workers consistently strike, not because they are not well paid (though nowhere near airline pilots- though that is in free-fall), but because cuts to staff lead to safety issues.
The profits of the train system has never been higher, and the salaries of workers has stagnated in real terms for more than a decade.
Sure, but HS2 has little to do with Network Rail, the government entity that owns and operates most of the UK’s existing rail infrastructure.
There’s a whole other inefficient bureaucracy (HS2 Ltd) behind HS2!
Well, what do you expect? Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung is a far-left NGO (the N stands for "Near"), the official trust of the German political party Die Linke.
I’m curious as to the criteria there. A train driver must, surely, be more stressed than a software engineer? They’re in charge of a moving vehicle that carries hundreds of people. And yet software engineers will still often make more than train drivers do.
(Median total reward for TOC train drivers is £66,043) https://www.orr.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/review-of...
I don't necessarily know what the right salary is but it's shift work (and you don't get to choose your hours), you're in charge of a lot of people's safety, there's a non zero chance you'll watch someone die in front of you (if they jump on the tracks). It's... not nothing. And if we're looking at how much economic benefit a given job provides a country a train driver is surely a large multiplier.
Just to clarify a point. My main complaint isn't even that they are overpaid. If their bosses want to fleece everyone, why can't they? It's more the absolute selfishness of their actions that bothers me.
?!? You're saying they're bad people because they take a salary offered to them? Is a software engineer that takes a higher salary a bad person too?
Thatcher was probably right about needing a reform of the Unions, but unfortunately for Britain she identified the wrong solution to for the right problem.
That is exactly why people despise trade unions. Doctors and nurses won't strike on busy season. The trains need to run either way. Strike during off season if you have to. Don't maximise misery for political gain.
on a more serious note, why is it always (ok, not every time, but too many times) a software developer (or adjacent) looking down on categorically more stressful and lower paid jobs? Must be some "huh they deserve it for not knowing bubblesort" type of mentality
Ignoring the tremendous amount of route training, rules, regulations, etc. — plus if they're delayed (generally through no fault of their own), they're worrying about the per-minute fines levied for delays to the service, and whether they can make the time up. That aside,
— try reporting that comment to any driver who has suffered a fatality... someone appearing on the tracks in front of them and there is no way whatsoever for them to stop in time.
Many drivers end up having to give up their careers after experiencing a "one-under", and don't get back into the cab.
It can be a lot more stressful than you think.
Well, that's the point of going on strike. Don't blame the drivers, blame the rail company.
> It's not a stressful job
It actually is, there aren't that many jobs where you are literally responsible for hundreds if not nearly a thousand (ICE-4 has 918 seats alone plus probably 100-200 standing people) lives behind your seat. Even your A380 has only half of that as capacity. The only comparable job is being captain of a cruise liner ship.
> I am increasingly convinced that the second part of making rails great again, after putting rail companies in their place is driverless trains.
Driverless trains in practice only work on a closed system with no at-grade crossings of any kind. There's a reason we only see them in "peoplemover" style systems or in subways that usually have full-height doors preventing unauthorized access.
The only actual full-size railway running ATO is the Rio Tinto ore train in Australia... with large sections of the 800 km long drive having the advantage of being in the utter desert with no one and no thing besides kangaroos posing any sort of danger to the train.
Profit is essentially interest. The only reason new and growing companies get funded is because the EV of future profits (including the probability of losing everything) is higher than just stuffing that same money in S&P 500.
DB (Schenker) buys stakes in transportation all over the world - with German tax payer money: A fact that many Germans do not like given the very poor train service in their own country.
Ah, the traditional privatize the profit, and nationalize the losses then. Great.
By the way, Cargo is the mode of operation where most profitable rail companies are. Hence the dualism of loss-incurring Amtrak and profitable North Amercian freight operators as well.
DBs state is probably too unique to draw any conclusions (attempted privatization stopped just before IPO, so now it's lot of different state-owned private organizations with degraded infrastructure). But the stations are actually fairly straight forward: the platforms and the means to get there are still publicly owned, but 80% of the station buildings have been sold off to private operators. The bigger ones are glorified malls that are exempt from laws about shopping hours, the smaller ones mostly just decay
Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.
Yes, those crashes happened, and they were disasters, but they were only partially down to rail track being privatised. They were a result of systemic under investment both pre and post privatisation.
THe _other_ key thing that needs to be remembered is that rail is highly regulated. To the point that both price, timetables profit and pay are controlled by the deparment of transport.
The bigger issue is that actually the department of transport doesn't have the specialists needed to run the railways, they are hired in as consultants.
If you compare that to TFL, which operates both private (DLR and some of the overground) and public (most of the tubes, not sure about elizabeth line) and buseses (which are entirely private)
The railways are in the state they are because of poor governance from central government. and poor investment, also from government.
IF they had been publicly owned, we'd be in the same state, because the UK government is not currently able to run services effectively. Unless and until the political classes are willing to pay civl servants competitive rates of pay and trust data, then we will continue to be in a mess.
Yes, privatization is bad, but the lack of effective governance is the hidden crisis here.
If you compare to the 70s when the government was throwing cash at these industries (largely because of the political incentives), it is unbelievable how low costs are. The problem is that the political intervention has been very bad, the public liability comes from bad regulation (which was just as true in the 70s).
For example, in energy the regulator has encouraged operators, like Tomato Energy the most recent failure, who are very clearly not operating in a financially sustainable way. If you look at who works for regulators (and look at what they get up to outside of regulation, in other parts of government), I am not sure how you can conclude that it could ever be any other way. We are paying for people who are largely unemployable outside of government to attempt to govern companies that are responsible for powering the whole of the country. Why does anyone think is wise?
Another example mentioned in the OP is retaining much in public ownership and then privatizing ROSCOs...it isn't just this is a bad idea, it is so clearly a bad idea that it is unclear who could have thought this is a bad idea. Again, this happened because of very ineffective regulation/political leadership.
Finally, what profits? One of the issues with most regulated industries is that the profits are very low because of the politics (for some reason, people think that public ownership will fix this...rather than make it much worse...we don't need to imagine, the UK has tried this several times, it has failed every time but the politics mean that there is no option but to keep trying it). The result has led companies to do things that are not wise because, otherwise, investors will pull capital. If you read any article about this is any paper in the UK, you would assume that the profits on offer in these industries are wild...they are not, share prices are collapsing, the reason why the government is taking over rail operating companies is because they are going bust, there is massive demand destruction in almost all of these areas because prices are sky-high, profits are non-existent, demand is being destroyed, and no-one wants to deal with the lack of supply because it would require admitting that the world isn't divided into Monopoly Man and a Victorian urchin.
There are countries that have made it work but the UK will never be one of them because of the political environment (significantly more raucous than the European style of managed democracy).
The problem is that there is massive political gain to both sides so we will likely keep rotating through the same options. In either case, the exact same people are in control, and no-one will ever ask whether the issue might be the people.
I also think that people fundamentally misunderstand why they were privatized: the public cost was massive, it was ever growing, and there was no capacity to fix this. Any discussion around money was completely impossible. Can you think of any part of the government where this is true? Actually, can you think of any part of the government where this isn't true? The government struggles to do bin collections, they struggle to police effectively, nothing works...and people assume that the problems will magically be fixed if they are given more control.
I think the lack of investment is a side-effect btw. There is a massive issue in the UK with management, it stretches across government, the larger public sector, and the private sector. It is true that in regulated industries, regulators have created bad incentives for the private sector, this is true generally of the incentives that government creates for the private sector...but even outside of those areas, it is generally quite bad. One of the sources of this problem is the complete and total obsession with politics outside of the outcomes that it creates i.e. the purpose of politics is politics, not running things effectively.
There is no real way to fix this (and we have done almost everything possible to make it worse).
but privatization makes that worse, by adding profit-seeking (which tends to minimize investments) to the lack of effective governance
the solution is improving governance and public investments, not privatization
(not to mention the problem with infrastructure paid for by the public over decades being sold off on the cheap to private companies who can reap the benefits thereof)
apart from in this instance, the amount of profit was dictated by the government as part of the franchise.
(I remember being amazed as a kid in the 90s on encountering a mainline train that had automatic doors. Irish Rail was pretty behind the times for a long time.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
Also higher revenue often means better service, which for most people is more important than the price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_in_the_...
Does any country have any success stories?
I can’t think of any.
Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town to build the next unicorn from his home benefits the entire nation. Not all talent is in the cities.
It's sarcasm, many drivers don't realize that the public subsidizes them too, but have such silly arguments.
For clarity's sake, I think railways should be public, and paid for with a combination of taxes and fares.
I think the difference is that the infrastructure (tracks and stations) is still owned by the state and leased out competitively to private train operators.
It’s kind of like the airline model.
The result is that the train operators get f'ed in the a by poor track maintenance and old trains. It has been so bad that when the trains run people joke it's "train for bus".
Also us customers can no longer buy one ticket that gets us from A to B but often have to contend with 2-3 different operators.
What Italy has done is open the rails to access by private companies in addition to the public one, most notably high speed operator NTV/Italo.
Arguably this competition has helped spur on the public operator to greater heights. But it’s not the same at all as what Britain did (privatizing the public operator itself).
I think whether privatization helps or hurts depends a lot on how corrupt or inept the government is, ie. the more corrupt or inept, the more privatization can probably help.
...so, a bit like Network Rail, then?
The model should be that rails are public and are leased to private operators.
The private companies pay for the maintenance and such, and then are free to do what they prefer.
* Government is unable (for various reasons, the primary one being massive levels of corruption) to invest in expanding capacity. Demand on certain routes is multiples of the capacity that exists. * The trains are owned by private companies, this was a bad idea. * Operating companies have had to put prices up because of all the things outside of their control. Government has been happy to let them take the blame, it has allowed things to be moved into public ownership, more power, more control. * No-one is making any money because the idea is for no-one to make any money. Making money is dirty so operating companies make no profit, and prices are sky-high.
The real problem, as always is NIMBYism and the western aversion to luxury malls and mass consumerism, which ends of in a self-reinforcing cycle of increasingly miserable public sphere as nobody wants to engage with it or make it better.
And they actually continue to expand their service.
Unfortunately, having a very high ratio also makes systems much more vulnerable to collapse during periods of economic downturn, which is exactly what BART has been dealing with since ridership collapsed during Covid.
I'm no expert in this topic (in other words, I just asked Claude this), but AFAICT part of the reason Japanese rail systems did better appears to be that they are owned by diversified companies that own numerous other assets, like hotels, restaurants, and office complexes.
I think Japan is successful because of a less pervasive car culture than the US. People expect to walk 30 minutes to the train in the morning, that's just something you do. It would be unheard of in the US (and also dangerous in many suburbs, because they are designed to move as many giant SUVs as possible per hour, not to let pedestrians and cyclists get to the train station).
Also, a big caveat is ... all of this is Tokyo and Osaka, very large, rich, and dense cities. When you go out into the middle of nowhere in Japan (even an hour out of Tokyo, think the Hachikō line, etc.), rail service kind of sucks and is subsidized heavily.
The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanently closed to cars 20 years ago).
As for trains, during rush hour trains can be so full you might be squashed against the door unable to move - incredibly unsafe, leads to daily injuries, and some argue have something to do with the heinous levels of sexual assault on trains. Not to mention even in Shinjuku station most platforms don't have guardrails to prevent accidental or purposeful death by trains, another outsized problem in Tokyo.
But the most glaring issue is around the very design of the system. Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train. A government managed system wouldn't have this issue, it would simply combine the stations at design time.
Tokyo has the top 3 busiest train stations in the world. 8 of the top 15, 9 if you count Yokohama. To argue that they're somehow failing to provide a service, and that privatization is the problem, just sounds insane. [1]
It's 'don't let perfect be the enemy of good' taken to the very extreme. I'm really not sure how to have a productive conversation with this premise.
>Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train
Heavy emphasis on sometimes since they're often connected at a station if it's busy enough (yes you have to 'exit' a gate then enter another. There's plenty examples of lines in city subways not having tunnels between them as well, and having to walk outside.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
> Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train.
I believe this is the result of different private companies operating physically separate lines, rather than some privatization activities? For example, Shinjuku has stations of JR East (result of JNR privatization), Keio (private), Odakyu (private), Toei (public), Tokyo Metro ("private" but owned by Japan gov and tokyo metro gov). Sure, JNR privatization is controversial but without that, Shinjuku is still a mess of different operators.
Are you suggesting the government turn back time and banned private companies owning rail or they should buy out and nationalize all rails companies?
> A government managed system wouldn't have this issue
Well, if it's 2 different government levels and 2 entities, the issue still exists. For example, to transfer between Tokyo Metro and Toei Subway, you might need to tap or a transfer ticket https://www.tokyometro.jp/lang_en/ticket/types/connection/in...
It's also possible for public and private companies to cooperate. Keikyu main line (private) does through running on Toei Asakusa line that allows the subway to have connections to both airports through private rails.
Nowadays, with IC cards, transferring between systems is a breeze. For the walking distance, nothing much you can do besides moving the track itself (done sometimes) or station redesign with better walkways and tunnels (done often).
I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but: is there a reason they can't run more trains or higher-passenger-capacity trains? The demand is obviously there, so the question is: do they like it super-crowded?
There are several limits on the length of trains, but the primary one is platform length. It's no use running a 7 car train if all of your platforms are 6 cars long - anything you might gain in capacity per train is wiped out by increased dwell time. You can extend platforms, but it's expensive, disruptive and only works if you have sufficient space at all (or practically all) of the stations on the route.
Japan can't really justify major rail investment, because passenger demand has been steadily declining for decades. Peak-time trains get progressively less busy every year, simply because there are fewer commuters every year.
Length is limited by platform length and width is limited by tunnel loading gauge and platform sizes. To increase the platform length, you have to do it at most if not all stations. Crowded stations are usually in desirable areas which make it harder to dig or acquire land.
> run more trains
For lines at capacity, I believe it's usually limited by trains dwell time. Longer and bigger trains take longer for people to safely board. To improve this on the train side, you can have more doors and bigger doors. Station platforms also need to be bigger, have more stairs, bigger walkways, etc. Longer trains also make it tougher for train drivers and station staff to open and close the doors safely.
Tough but not impossible problems but many solutions contain trade offs. Only surefire way is to build another line but that costs tons of money.
I disagree that this is a failure of privatization (other than the last point) and I also disagree that Japan’s success is a vindication of privatization (although it does show that above average systems are possible through privatization) but those are reasonable discussions to have
For transit nerds like me though, it's frustrating when all the evidence points to the same conclusion: more trains, more pedestrian throughput, no cars, and yet no city has gone this route full throated.
I was genuinely shocked on at the amount of space given to cars on my first trip to Copenhagen last month. I was promised bicyclist utopia, instead I was presented with massive lanes for cars, confusing intersections, and in a construction area being forced onto a narrow sidewalk full of pedestrians.
Frankly I don't know any city on earth getting it right. I've heard maybe Shanghai but from videos I've seen of car culture in the PRC, I doubt it.
The bar is just very low in this world right now.
That's not the fault of the railways but govenrment policy in the 60-80s. Everybody drunk the US coolaid.
British Telecom lost its monopoly around the same time it was privatised. Is today's (very competitive) telecommunications market more a result of privatisation or of the loss of BT's monopoly?
Another way to look at it would be, are BT's customers better off now, than when it was a government company?
That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades.
Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, who develops the technology?
It seems like they had managed to bring the cost below copper:
> In 1986, I managed to get fibre to the home cheaper than copper
> we had two factories, one in Ipswich and one in Birmingham
But the British government was concerned:
> BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do
> So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45915949
This might be an argument for privatisation, because the government was still in full control of the company when they prevented the fibre rollout. Would the owner of a private company squander such an advantage over concerns for their competitors?
On the other hand, would a private company have had the capability to plan this forward in the first place? We do see that from Big Tech companies (e.g. Apple silicon) but could BT have done it under private ownership?
So I think new technology is generated through research funding, either public sector (universities) or R&D depts in private companies (today companies like Apple, previously old school companies like pre-Welch GE). I guess BT was more like the latter, except state owned.
In telecoms there's also a universal service obligation, which does not make economic sense when driven purely by profit motive. Cost of rolling out fiber to a small village will probably never be recouped. Thats why FTTH w/ Virgin Broadband was only available in cities for a long time, and expensive.
In the US where telecoms have regulatory capture, and no public access telecom network, you see stories of rural communities trying to fund their own infra. It's expensive.
Cost of rollout and universal service can be helped by rolling out at scale, building the factories, reducing unit price etc.
So all this together.... I think private companies _can_ have the foresight to do this kind of forward planning... But a big nationwide rollout of a public good? Where is their financial incentive? They would provide an environment for the acceleration of future commerce and technological development. But if they don't make money from it, why would they?
In Australia, we went through a similar journey where fiber to everyone's home was planned and then politically destroyed. Except this happened in 2010 and has been a significant factor in our inability to retain a technical edge.
So..... not really a point for privatization here.
It could of course also have just been a failure if tried to early. So we should just assume this would have worked out perfectly.
I'd say the issues today (fragmented services offerings, high prices, low speeds) are more due to under investment in the infrastructure (keeping copper for too long) - which could have just as easily happened if it was government run.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...
I do not think the problems have gone away; dealing with OpenReach is very often as kafkaesque as it would have been.
For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.
MG might be the exception, but it’s a bit of a weird situation in that it went from being owned by a loss making British state owned enterprise (Leyland) to being owned by a loss making Chinese state owned enterprise (SAIC). Still makes popular, cheap and not very reliable cars though.
The semi-successful ones are the "shell company" ones: telecoms, power, and railways. The user gets a choice of who to get customer service on, which feels nicer than a government bureaucracy, but the infrastructure is a natural monopoly so the actual hardware delivering the service is mostly the same.
Electricity markets work pretty well as a market and has miraculously managed a lot of carbon transition, but is now horrendously expensive (like trains) in a way that's becoming politically important. The public are going to demand that something be done. AI power use is not helping here.
The less successful ones are the actual big capital asset ownership ones: RailTrack PLC, OpenReach, water companies, the nuclear industry.
Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.
I know that there are some nuances to this, but this makes sense right? If you think you can compete on say London-Amsterdam, your airline can in principle decide to compete there (yes, they need slots, etc.).
If you want to compete with rail between Amsterdam and Berlin, you are either going to pay an insane amount for extra infrastructure (too expensive) or you have to let companies bid on exploiting a line. But you can never have two companies competing at exactly the same times.
But let's all take a moment to acknowledge that it would be awesome if they had them. Can you imagine the shenanigans you could get up to designing a nationwide 40,000-foot-high rollercoaster system?
Air travel lends itself better to competition and it needs much, much less infrastructure than rail.
Of course BOAC and BEA had been made my consolidations of many smaller airlines which gets messy quickly when tracing the lineage. Even Cambrian and Northeast had formed British Air Services prior to this which was 70% owned by BEA.
So it is technically true that is was started as a state owned airline, but one made from companies that were originally created as private with a mixed history of state ownership.
When you effectively hand over state property to high-ranking communists for less than five percent of its real value, that is not a privatization.
https://mdta.maryland.gov/Partnerships/tp3Overview.html
I don't know enough to say if Seagirt is considered a success but I do know Baltimore's port does very well. The Purple Line is/was a failure.
Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).
The exception I guess is hospitals which are kind of a mixed structure of some kind and doctors in them are salaried employees not businesses of their own.
The problem with this approach is it intrinsically creates conflict between the doctors and the gov't about how fees are structured, and the patient gets stuck in the middle. That and inconsistent standards, structure, and quality. Couple that with conservative governments that sometimes have ideological antipathy to socialized medicine generally, and there's a recipe for difficulties.
I'm given to understand that the NHS in the UK is not like this, and most doctors are salaried?
I could be getting some details wrong.
I'm not against taking these things away from government but it might be better to have a non-profit that isn't as directly controlled by the whims of politicians. Independent similarly like the Bank of England with very clear metrics/goals on how to run the company.
water/electricity/gas have been abject failures
railways have been a mixed bag
some things are better (quality of service is much better), some things are worse (subsidy and cost)
but a good chunk of that is under direct government control, and has been for a very long time
the only private bit is/was the TOC, "train operating company" (and roscos... which are another subject)
TOCs essentially just put a driver in the cab, and collect the fares and send them to the government
they don't maintain the track, they don't set the fares, they don't set driver pay, they don't control the service pattern
if your train service sucked during the last few years: it's probably the government's fault
Imagine having one mobile phone provider.
The privatisation of BT meant that there was no specific monopoly on ISPs during the Internet boom. While the privatised BT had a monopoly on the wires - customers could choose from hundreds of different dial-up and, later, ADSL ISPs.
Similarly, the privatisation of the mobile phone networks means that the UK had some of the cheapest airtime contracts in the EU. Yes, there are still gaps in network coverage, but there were at the peak 5 different MNOs for customers to choose from each competing and driving down prices / increasing coverage.
Energy has been mixed. Companies like Octopus have provided things like real-time electricity APIs. I can't imagine an organisation like British Gas launching something like that. Similarly, if your power supplier has crap customer service, you can move. And people do! In that sense, it has been a success.
Pickfords was also privatised. People forget that house-moving companies were nationalised during WW2. The liberalisation of that market has been a success.
You can argue about things like Rolls Royce, BP, British Airways etc. But I don't think they offset the utter failures of privatising water, trains, etc.
If you lease a road or school for 20 years, it doesn't show up as debt in your books, which the city has made necessary for itself, because it has saddled budgeting framework with some arbitrary debt caps that are constantly at the limit.
This can be sold as a success story depending on how it's told - it lets you get the school you need after all (even if it's wasting money vs doing it the normal way). And it's making the participating companies great profits, just don't mention whose pockets it comes out of.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-3...
I would say the motive here was mostly to avoid increasing the government debt numbers. it would not work if the government did not exempt itself form the rules applied to everyone else.
Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.
There are legit reasons to be skeptical of privatization, but yes. It works well when it works.
Dogmatic responses (free market == everything, only government and unions can provide service) are not helpful.
This is false. Saudi Arabi buys equipment from private companies. Most US Defense contractors are private companies, of course countries all around the world buy from private companies.
The defense contracts of Airbus have nothing to do with them being partially state owned.
Extreme absurdities included hunting whales to fulfil production quota, then dumping carcasses into sea as they were not needed for anything. Some species were hunted into extinction this way, for no benefit whatsoever.
The challenge with so many UK privatisations is that the idea of real alternatives/competition ranges from laughable to extremely laughable.
Both Airbus and Volkswagen were set up by Governments. T-Mobile is arguably quite successful.
I think many of the telephone operator privatization worked pretty well in most places and buildup of user business for those companies and more competition, mostly from formerly public operators competing in other markets. But it also depends on the country.
Some of the airline privatization seems to me also sensible.
In my country (Switzerland) government owned some banks or partly old them and sold some stock in them, witch seems sensible to me.
Some water infrastructure was privatized and regulated in many countries and for the most part this has worked fine, maybe not in Britain.
Denmark seems to have done quite a lot of privatization and it was mostly considered pretty well done.
I was really surprised how much of this was done all over Europe, often by 'left' governments. Once you start researching you find more and more.
Would be the work for an economists thesis or something to try to do a full accounting of this across all European nations.
1. Internet Service Provision
Britain chose to separate the intrinsically geographic monopoly of Last Mile Copper Loops from its existing non-intrinsic monopoly telephony provision. British Telecom, which had once been publicly owned, was obliged to distinguish "BT Openreach", the part of their company which inherits the local loop monopoly and which also offers (non-monopoly) long distance network transit and other useful stuff - from the consumer facing BT, which is a fairly ordinary PLC. I know a BT employee, the regulators really care that they can't collude with Openreach.
This means that the tiny company providing my Internet access (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't need to own a large brick building down the street, or even a cabinet in that building, or negotiate a deal with a monopoly behemoth who can set their own terms unfairly. Instead, they pay Openreach to move packets from my home to a nearby city, and then they can choose to pay Openreach or its competitors to move those packets from the city to their routers. BT Openeach is a monopoly, but it's an ordinary public company just with a lot of regulations to ensure it behaves equally for A&A as it does for its owners BT. BT isn't a monopoly but it does have lots of customers, I think its services are crap or alternatively that they're too expensive (A&A is more expensive but much, much better, if BT were much cheaper than they are maybe that's a good deal for somebody)
This arrangement means most UK residents have dozens of potential reasonable ISP options, with a range of pricing and terms, including lots of "All you can eat" type packages, even if they don't live in a big city. People like me who do live in a big city get slightly more options (a Cable TV company, a local fibre startup), which can go cheaper and higher bandwidth, but only a few people are stuck with a single practical option as is common in the US - basically only people in very rural areas, and usually their option is community owned, so it may not be cheap but it's at least owned by actual people who might care.
2. Energy
Britain separately privatised the gas and electricity supply. Now on the surface this is lunacy because of course that's a geographic monopoly. But they're not complete idiots, so what was actually privatised was mostly the customer service/ end user billing part of the problem. My gas and electricity come from the same place as my neighbour, inevitably because they're the same pipes and wires, but my bills and my customer service are from my choice which happens to be Octopus.
Does this achieve anything useful? Eh, maybe. I don't think a local energy monopoly would be anywhere close to as good at either customer service or billing. Octopus seem to have some idea what they're actually doing. On the downside these firms have ended up costing tax payers a bunch of money because of course when one goes bust the gas and electricity are still working but the government is on the hook to ensure somebody else handles billing them for it and that's complicated. This happens far too often when there is stress on the financials of these firms e.g. the Ukraine situation fluctuated energy bills with little notice.
Edited: fix s/citizen/resident/ what matters isn't your passport but where you live
On energy, we have many companies competing and offering really diverse products. Octopus were once a small little upstart but they became top dog by providing decent support, incentives and new products such as tariffs that track the wholesale rate - including negative pricing. They've got a REST API that you can use to pull all kind of data out for various home automation use cases - I can't ever imagine a government run company providing that.
Yes, but it depends on how/why things are done. You don't hear about the successes because it's not a story worth telling.
Charter schools are a good example. They have mixed success when deployed. In many places they're deployed by right-wing politicians primarily to weaken public schools (and their unions). This can be done via a variety of ways, such as letting the charter schools charge extra (thereby essentially subsidizing private schools), allowing the schools to "expel" problem children, thereby dumping the public system with them, etc. The result is usually a framework that isn't designed to actually make education better.
In some places (Sweden is a good example), charter schools were implemented by a centre-left government because all attempts at school reform failed due to a variety of reasons. The result was by most measures successful as the charter schools couldn't pick and choose kids, were still held accountable, and it resulted in the public schools having to stop fighting reform in order to sort of compete.
The Canada line in Vancouver (metro link to the airport) was build on time and on budget and is still run by a P3 company, as is the new REM line in Montreal. The incentives here were ONE company was given a contract with clearly laid out incentives and minimal political meddling after that (as opposed to other P3s where the government is highly involved and subcontracts, etc get doled out to connected firms, etc).
The UK car industry was mostly privatized, but judgement on its post-privatization failure mostly goes down political lines (eg should a government continue to subsidize poorly made cars in the name of employment). Same with most of the rest of industrial Britain, which under public ownership was uncompetitive in most cases. That being said, most would consider Rolls-Royce to be successful and was privatized in the 1980s.
BP's privitization was mostly a success, even with all its issues.
Canada privatized CN rail and it is now one of the most efficient freight railroads in North America.
Telecom privatization in the EU has mostly been a success (though one could argue that the EU has pushed for too much competition, which has meant that while mobile prices are generally very low, it has made it harder for companies to invest).
Many airlines outside of the USA were also publicly owned pseudo-monopolies. Flying is cheaper than it's ever been, even if no longer glamourous.
The TL;DR is of course it's a mixed bag and depends on so many factors. Many UK industrial firms were so poorly run under private ownership that they were so far behind they couldn't catch up and compete once privatization did happen.
I'm sorry but any US figure you use to support this allegation is probably nonsense. US figures about joblessness and poverty are a joke, and typically in international comparisons they still use things like "access to air conditioning" as an indicator of poverty even though they are meaningless.
My understanding is that in the US Amtak runs a net-positive operating income in the Northeast Corridor (Boston-NYC-Philly-DC) but it all goes toward subsidizing unprofitable routes throughout the rest of the country. To the tune of the entire system running a $2 billion loss every year.
So in theory you could get some private rail to run trains up and down the northeast seaboard, upstate NY, Long Island, and possibly come out with a net profit.
That to me is insanely cheap. Surely fuel would be like 45 EUR, not to mention the cost of parking in Amsterdam?
Maybe it's just because a similar journeys in the UK (Manchester to London) would be about 130 EUR.
(Assuming I've understood correctly - you pay about 6 EUR a month for Flex Dal Voordeel and get a 40% discount right?)
There are EU competition rules that require separating operations from infrastructure, but it is and always has been fine to do this as separate divisions under the same publicly owned umbrella.
De facto it is required, and you see that in Germany - many routes are not operated by DB anymore.
The key problem the EU has is the size of the contract. The contract cannot be for the entire country (more or less), it needs to be split into smaller ones (eg: one contract for intercity, one contract for local services near Amsterdam, etc). Netherlands defense is that the passenger rail system cannot be split up like this as it would cause operational problems and thus should not be franchised. I'm simplifying this from memory but it's roughly correct I think.
There is no doubt in my mind were it to be split up like the EU is requiring, that de facto some of it would be privatized. It has/is happening in every European state that has complied with the EU rules.
To me that is very close to forced privatisation. The current (Labour) UK model (government owned franchises with no bidding) would 100% not be allowed.
2014 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proportion-of-tra... Now https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passeng...
The number of passengers dropped after nationalizations, and exploded after privatisation (despite taxpayer money investment logically dropping)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GBR_rail_passengers_...
Other than a huge explosion in the number of people using trains? literally Chernobyl-on-wheels
I believe this is a mistranslation of "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by me" or more precisely "so that decisions about the railways we use are made by the sort of people that like attending committee meetings and working their way up the inside of political parties"
The privatisation was very likely botched, however, it was not as if it was done in a secret - the "fire sale" only happened at "rock bottom prices" with hindsight. The nationalisation itself was fairly botched and it is hardly as if the decimation of Britain's railways implemented following the Breeching Report (completed on a nationalised rail system) was particularly effective.
I am thinking of the three credit bureaus in the US. These companies suck, and offer 0 innovations, but we are stuck them for the foreseeable long term.
It's not at all clear that railways will have consistent, adequate funding in the public realm, not least because the government is leery of capital expenditure and is always interested in ways to make debt levels look smaller.
Although, even with this in mind, it seems as if the UK really has a notoriously bad railway system. Most countries in the EU of a comparable size have a better railway system as such, even though they also have their own problems. One of the best in Europe is in Switzerland - the swiss really are clever. And also not in the EU.
Affordability is really driven by how much the operators are subsidized by the govt. It's hard to calculate this on a like for like basis as some subsidy goes to the track operator and some to the train operator, and in eg Germany you have a hugely complex set of subsidies and fare zones in operation from various levels of government.
I don't expect the other European systems to be any cheaper - it's just hidden in the tax system instead.
Where the UK shines imo is two things. 1 is the frequency of many services. It's rare to have less than 2 trains per hour on an intercity route, and often far more.
This compares to France (outside TGV) which is atrocious. Non regular timetable with often 2-3 hour gaps on trains.
Spain (even on the high speed lines) is even worse. Some _high speed lines_ can't even manage an hourly service. This has got far better recently on high speed lines with private competition, but outside of that the timetabling is terrible.
The other is some of the ticketing options. Firstly, there is a no questions asked delay repay feature which means you get a substantial portion of the ticket refunded if there is any delay for any reason, starting at a 15minute delay. Obviously no delays are better than a refunded one, but I've had some atrocious delays in mainland europe and no option to apply for a refund.
The other is no composlary reservations (though I'm not sure how long this will last). If you have a valid ticket, you can get on. In many EU countries if a train is out of seats you don't even have the option to buy a ticket and stand. Combine this with poor timetables on many routes and it can cause huge problems if you are travelling at short notice.
Netherlands and Switzerland good for sure - better than the UK I would say. But Germany/France/Italy/Spain have a lot of issues.
The total costs might be the same, but if paid out of the taxes, the cost is distributed progressively. People who earn more will pay more to keep the trains running. In the UK, the cost is regressive by definition, because the portfolio manager who earns 1 million pounds a year will pay the same expensive ticket fare that the nurse who earns 40k a year, but for the PM it's a trivial expense. And the portfolio manager can work from home, or just drive in to work if they fancy, the nurse cannot. The nurse is forced to use an aging, unreliable and at the same time really expensive train.
And the service itself is positively atrocious even in London when it comes to any non-mainline route. It's a complete tossup whether the trains will have severe outages due to strikes, engineering works or the frequent signal failures.
Imagine if the season tickets were 50% cheaper overnight going into London, coming out of government funds.
You'd induce (I suspect) double the demand at rush hour, as people could move further from eg London and not be bothered about the price.
I definitely don't think the current ticketing system is right but if you moved to this model you'd have even greater overcrowding problems.
The public wants: Cheap, reliable, quality services.
A corporation wants: Maximized Revenue.
The two inevitably clash. No matter what business, no matter what country. Don't believe me? Go and find a single instance of a service that used to be provided completely by the government, that got BETTER FOR USERS (that is: The Public, not investors) after being privatized. I'll wait.
Public utilitis HAVE TO be run by the public, meaning the government. In pretty much every instance where this isn't the case, the provided service is more expensive, and/or less effective for the people.
And that's why I am sick and tired of the old trope "bUt pRivAtE sEcToR mOrE effIciEnt!" Sure. That would be the same private sector that caused almost every non-war related major economic crisis, is it not? I think the "efficiency argument" is already a moot point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
> Walmart Inc.[a] is an American multinational retail corporation
Should Tesco be run by the government? I use Tesco more than I take trains.
May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process
You won't have to wait long: flying. Shocked? You shouldn't be. In the 70s, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars to fly across the country. Now you can get a flight between NYC and London for $200.
Time to retract your entire little rant.
Air travel is also not privatized these days. The airports are nearly all owned by government entities.
https://techrights.org/n/2025/08/22/Enshittification_of_Airp...
You were saying?
It basically provides a bunch of graphs that confirms that flying is safer than ever, even as more people than ever fly at cheaper fares than ever. Embedded within the actual data is an unsubstantiated rant about enshittification and the danger of flying (despite the evidence they chose indicating the opposite), and a tangent about github.
Subways too.
There is no public transit system where fares cover all the costs, never mind generating a profit. Riders would refuse to pay a fare high enough to do this.
Airlines barely make a profit. I'm not sure about intercity rail globally but in the USA, Amtrak relies on government subsidies to operate. All the private railroads gave up passenger service decades ago because it was unprofitable in the face of new competition (i.e. cars and air).
Local bus and light rail service will never be profitable as a private enterprise. We'll see what happens once drivers can be eliminated, but I'm still doubtful. Plus the public will still want some sort of authority figure on the bus or train. It's one thing to feel safe in a Waymo where you're not sharing the vehicle with 20 strangers but a bus or subway is different. So trade driver for security/customer service person and you're not really saving on payroll.
If you factor in the spending on highways and road systems that can support high speed private vehicles at no direct cost to the end user, other forms of transport get incredibly competitive. Highway spending alone accounts for a quarter of a trillion per year. That doesn't account for spending at lower levels of government for streets and other car infrastructure.
>Plus the public will still want some sort of authority figure on the bus or train.
There are plenty of driverless transit systems. It is a very solved problem.
Privatizing such services and maintaining affordable fares is a complete non-starter. It cannot be done.
OK? Capitalism works because of the evil businessmen not in spite of them.
I'm sure Gregg's could put rats in the sausage rolls if they wanted to but suspect it wouldn't do much good for their footfall
Things really went downhill after 1773 (first Inclosure Act)
Today
The number of passengers on the railway is far ahead of the number in the 80s and 90s.
There is a persistent belief in the UK that privitisation of the railway was bad, yet it led to great things -- the constant Chiltern line investment, massive competition on the west coast mainline (you can walk up to the station and get a train from Manchester to London for £50 return taking about 3h30 -- it cost more than that and took the same time 30 years ago), Marylebone serving 16 million passengers a year pre-covid
There's been bad things too -- companies have failed and the government has chosen to bail the shareholders out rather than letting them fail and simply taking over, standard privatise the profits socialise the losses. Cross Country routes are screwed as it's a series of local services masquerading as a long distance one. Nationalisation doesn't help there.
But when we compare with German and French systems we see just how good the UK system is, despite the insanely cheap commuting (15, even 10p/mile) being subsidised by occasional long distance travellers.
It was much, much better - by any account of imagination - than the public railway we have here in Portugal. And I’m guessing they cost the taxpayers a lot less too (but that part I didn’t check).
(1) Most tourists visit largely London and its near surroundings. Public transport in (and to) London is generally much better than other parts of the country.
(2) A lot of the downsides don't manifest if you're a relatively infrequent user and you're largely travelling at off-peak times. As a UK resident who doesn't commute on the railway, this also includes me -- my experience of trains is generally good because I travel at quieter times and I don't travel so often that unreliability is a regular experience.
(3) If you ignore the costs (by not being a taxpayer or because you're less price sensitive for infrequent travel and especially for holiday travel), then you're ignoring the large part of the argument which is "this privatization had massive inefficiencies and costs".
FWIW, the UK government pays about half of the 25 billion/year cost of the "operational rail industry" (source: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/finance/rail-indust...). I couldn't find the equivalent stats for Portugal with a quick search, so I don't know how that compares.
Until relatively recently (things have improved in Scotland especially and now increasingly in English cities) it would have been illegal to do what London does anywhere else. My city really wanted a single card that works on a bus or a train anywhere in the city, they couldn't persuade anybody involved to actually do that and the cards went away without ever being actually useful.
Irish urban buses are like this in principle; they're branded TFI and operated by either Bus Eireann (state-owned) for non-Dublin stuff or Dublin Bus (state-owned) or GoAhead (private) for Dublin stuff. Only way to tell these days is a small notice on the door. However, you do care whether your route is Dublin Bus or GoAhead; if it's Dublin Bus it will probably merely be late, whereas if it's GoAhead it will probably be _very_ late or just cancelled. Is this not the case in London; ie are the operators all about the same in terms of level of service?
The funding for oeprating companies varies a lot, according to the chart on page 6, 3p per passenger kilometer for Thames link, 30p for Scotrail, -1.1p for west coast.
Yes, its not anything like a uniquely British problem, its widespread. Bigger projects are a lot more difficult to run, and governments are drawn to big projects.
Most complaints in the UK are about cost of tickets. They are very valid complaints imo, the cost of getting a train in this country can be absurd. There would be a really positive attitude towards train travel in the UK and our rail system if it wasn't trying to bankrupt you every time you use it.
In the South East, or if you're employer is paying for 1st class, definitely agree.
Trains get delayed and cancelled very frequently. They leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere because there's a technical issue fairly regularly: it's not a daily occurrence, but it's frequent enough that people will just go "ahhh classic british rail".
Trains are often packed, with literally nowhere to sit for hours-long journeys.
And this poor quality of service is very expensive. I know adults in their late 20s - early 30s with a fulltime job that choose to take the coach even though it's twice as long, because it's much cheaper. An ex-colleague was living outside of london, and spending £16k a year on train for commuting (you'd expect a big bill, but £16k is insane).
I'm sure there's plenty of countries that do worse, and as an infrequent traveller you'd probably be fine, but it's just... not great
As a whole though, at least out of major cities London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, the rail system is great.
As someone else mentioned, London (and really urban commuter services in general) are essentially separate; the problems are _primarily_ around the regional/intercity stuff.
One specific consequence of the privatisation. Earlier this year I visited Manchester. The airport to city route is operated by _two_ rail operators, on the same line. You buy a ticket for one service or other. I bought a ticket for operator A because their train was next. A few minutes later that train was cancelled, so I had to watch as a couple of operator B trains passed and wait for an operator A train.
I mean, no-one can tell me that’s a sensible way to run a railway.
(Mind you, this still beats Dublin airport, which currently has no rail at all, and under current plans will have _two_ separate rail lines around 2040-2050, and maybe a tram. Though, if that happens, at least the same ticket will work for both…)
Anytime Day Single: Any permitted - £6.70 Anytime Day Single: TPE only - £6.50 Anytime Day Single: Transport for Wales only - £5.40
Unfortunately many apps don't make this clear enough. I suspect you bought a TPE only ticket when any permitted would only be 20p more. Many apps will show you the cheapest ticket even if it results in massive downgrade in flexibility.
While it seems ridiculous (and tbh it is) on these kind of routes, it is useful on some routes, which the slower operator (eg Birmingham to London) is 1/3rd of the price of the fast one.
That practice should have been abolished long ago - it's totally anti-passenger.
GBR will likely solve this with removing the cheaper ticket, instead of making the cheaper ticket a generic ticket, of course :-)
As of June 2025, there is automatic ticket acceptance rules between those operators now in the case of cancellations and disruption, as both Northern and TPE are owned by the DfT.
Great British Railways will continue these kind of sensible changes (though not cheaper tickets, that's for sure!)
The railways in England and Wales are very adversarial. You have to do a lot of research and fight for your rights. It's about maximal revenue-extraction, not a customer-friendly experience.
The EU basically mandates privatisation of railways.
They require track and trains to be run by different operators (DB InfraGO in Germany, ProRail in NL, etc) to the train operators.
They then require (nearly?) all passenger rail operations be available to private companies to bid on. The EU is taking the Netherlands to the ECJ over the fact the Netherlands won't allow it: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
Also the EU requires open access operators access to said separate tracks. That's why you're seeing all the competition in high speed routes (especially) in the EU. They have to pay a track access fee but are free to request to run whatever route it is.
The last point (well, all are really) is a big problem for many national operators as they make a lot of revenue from 'premium' intercity operations that cross subsidies the local trains. A lot of that "margin" is going to be eroded by the competition.
A ticket for the next direct train (16:42, peak time) from Copenhagen to Århus is 449kr, £53. That's 300km in 3 hours.
London to Manchester is the same distance, 2¼ hours, and £193.
The downside of this pricing system is (a) everybody complains about its complexity (b) if you really do need to travel at peak time or at very short notice you're going to pay a lot (c) it's really easy to make it look like it's a terrible rip-off by quoting the anytime walkup fare for an intercity journey :-)
My example wasn't especially ridiculous. Try something like Stansted Airport to Birmingham — 200km, 45 minutes slower than driving, and £97 — or £67 off peak.
The other ridiculous feature of British train tickets is when some return tickets cost just £1 more than a single ticket.
But there are also trains for £80 that take 2h11m.
https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/journey-planner/?type=single&...
Those are indirect train services. That can also be the return price, which is very very good value. You do have to be careful with travelling the right route and company
(Also bear in mind the median income after tax is 50% higher in Denmark.)
I don't blame you. They do make it VERY hard to find and buy that particular cheaper ticket
Ticket websites generally assume you have unlimited funds and want the fastest route, always.
Every year without fail this goes up by a noticable amount, but the service is still unreliable. Looking back at my travel history, the train has either been late to arrive or late to get to my destination around 30% of the time. That delays can vary a lot as well between about 10mins (this morning for example) to 30 minutes on average.
But that's the average picture, the winters get so much worse for my route. There's a tunnel just before our station which frequently has water pouring through when it rains heavily which means no trains can run until it stops. Several times I've left my house with all the trains listed as running on-time and arrived at the station to be told by the (very nice) guard that he doesn't expect there to be any trains through until mid day.
They also get very crowded, at least on my route. They're meant to send a 3 carriage train but will frequently end up with only 2 carriages because they had a problem with one of them. This usually delays people boarding which means the resulting journey is around £8.40 for no seat and a 10-15 minute delay.
The UK rail sure isn't the worst in the world by any stretch. When a journey goes well it's seemless and I'm a big fan. But a lot of the time it feels like you're being bent over, especially when after several weeks of reduced services due to strikes you're suddenly met with a price hike of 5% with no improvement in the services reliability. All of that is just when you're talking about commuting as well. Any time I'm forced to head to London it's a miserable emptying of my wallet.
All of this is just my daily experience, but I'm so sick of this failed experiment. Each year it costs more, the service is just as unreliable, and the profits all leave the UK.
Maybe my expectations aren't reasonable, but it's something I'm effectively forced to use daily because of house prices.
And we saw what the others did in the meantime. Swiss, Austrian, China, all huge success stories. Without privatization
> the case against fragmented and privatized operations focuses on three key arguments. The first is that railways are complex systems where commercial boundaries at engineering interfaces are a threat to safety and efficiency. The second is that railway operations are geographic monopolies where market conditions are — at best — contrived. The third is that railways are a public service that cannot fail — hence, introducing private interests into the railways is merely a way to sequester income into private hands while the state shoulders the financial risk. In other words, private interests’ role is simply to extract profit that could otherwise be reinvested into the system.
That is true of most infrastructure. The closest parallel i can think of is the airline industry. It may never be perfect but these problems are solveable.
Next the claim that moving decisions away from Westminster will make things better. That is highly debatable.
Finally the main point. The nationalised railway worked well in the 90s so it would work well today. That is such an obviously flawed argument i won't even bother discussing it. I think the local government in London has far more direct control of local transport and it is horribly inefficient and expensive. Finally look at the ongoing, slow motion train wreck which is the hs2 rail project. At this stage it's just a government employment program for labourers. It's way, way too expensive and they should have pulled the plug on it years ago or drastically deregulated idk. As it is we have the worst of both worlds.
However, it is interesting that Thatcher didn't want to privatise the rails. Does anyone know what her opinion on it was?
Where I think privatisation went wrong (the core concept of having private operators bid on franchises is ~right imo) is the state lost a lot of 'management' knowledge that was in British Rail. This has really killed us because we don't know how to build complex civil engineering projects anymore, and _the management_ of them gets outsourced to large contractors like Arup at eye watering costs.
They also have a terrible conflict of interest as if they manage it well, they often get paid much less than managing a slow moving disaster of a project.
I think this needs to be solved first, not getting the state to operate train fleets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
> Estimates of individuals killed range from a low of 10–20 million to as high as 148 million.
1. The idea of trickle down economics; and
2. That public-private partnerships ("PPPs" were a stalwart of Thatcher and Blair) do anything other than simply transfer wealth from the public sector to the private sector. Put another way, PPPs socialize the risk and privatize the profits.
For anyone who pays attention and can think critically, this is the least suprising thing that can possibly happen and was evident decades ago.
For the railways in particular, railroads (technically, train operating companies or TOCs) in the UK have zero incentive to invest in rolling stock, track, signalling systems or stations because they own none of it. So all they do is engage in cutting costs and gaming politics to raise prices to increase profits. That's all that happens.
You can say that British Rail needed reform and funding but PPPs were simply not the answer.
This is an article by a communist rag and NGO, which is also paid for by the German tax payer. Why would anyone care what they have to say?
