Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/53917/britains-railway-privatization-was-an-abject-failure

by robtherobber • 8 months ago

474 446 8 months ago

rosalux.de

wood_spirit• 8 months ago

Does Britain have any privatisation success stories? Or any public-private partnership (PPP) success stories?

Does any country have any success stories?

I can’t think of any.

rPlayer65542• 8 months ago

Japan’s rail privatization was extremely successful and it’s considered one of the best rail networks in the world now.

ApolloFortyNine2• 8 months ago

Japan's rail system has some of the best farebox ratio's across their system (many of their lines actually make money, which if you compare to other countries, is pretty much unheard of in North America). [1]

And they actually continue to expand their service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

dboreham2• 8 months ago

Japan has a culture of running trains on time though. There is no MBA figuring out that they can pay themselves a bigger bonus by firing the backup train drivers needed to ensure on-time service.

komali22• 8 months ago

I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness.

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.

_jab• 8 months ago

In the US, one of the highest farebox recovery ratio transit systems has historically been BART, which is 2019 was 72%, and even today is around 50%.

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.

joshuaissac2• 8 months ago

It's hard to measure this.

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?

arethuza3• 8 months ago

I would say BT got worse immediately after privatisation and now have got better - largely I suspect due to competition.

nyreed2• 8 months ago

BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance.

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?

n4r95• 8 months ago

It's hard to tell with counterfactuals like that. One factor to bear in mind is that BT was close to rolling out nationwide fibre in the early 90's [0]. Would it have made more sense to decouple infrastructure and service, or would that have led to a nightmare like we have with the trains?

[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost...

fy20• 8 months ago

Not directly from privatisation, but in 2006 BT was forced to split the infrastructure part of their business into a separate company (OpenReach). They were forced to allow other providers to use their infrastructure, which during the broadband-era led to pretty healthy competition.

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.

fulafel2• 8 months ago

Don't know about britain, but generally a popular neoliberal thing with PPPs is to copy the private sector and "turn capex into opex".

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.

graemep8• 8 months ago

That has happened in Britain. it was how Gordon Brown claimed a balanced budget while running up what would be classified as off balance sheet debt if anyone other than the government did it. A lot of things like hospitals were financed this way.

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.

panick21_6• 8 months ago

This isn't really true, running things in the government also cost a huge amount of opex. Sure you do get one time payment and the resulting company will have to be hired but it will usually also have to start to compete. This could potentially result in more or less opex.

Running an airline just so you don't have opex seems a bit silly to me for example.

pjc503• 8 months ago

PFI has been an absolute disaster in Scotland: not only incredibly expensive, but there were some substandard construction issues that became very public when a wall in a school simply fell over (fortunately outside hours so no injuries!)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-3...

InTheArena• 8 months ago

Depends, do you travel through any of the airports in Europe, use many of the train services in Europe, get power from spain, portugal or (non-nuclear) France? Fly on a Airbus, or a Boeing with RR engines?

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.

paganel• 8 months ago

Airbus is by all intents and purposes a (multi-)State controlled company with privatized profits. You don’t get to have hefty defense contracts in countries like Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia if you’re de facto a private company, which they aren’t.

spacebanana73• 8 months ago

In the UK the airline and telecom privatisations were largely successful (BA, Rolls Royce, BT, etc). BP did okay too.

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.

microtonal• 8 months ago

For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.

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.

dboreham2• 8 months ago

These entities are not really the same kind of thing. BA and RR were successful private companies that ran into difficulty for one reason or another and took on the UKG as an investor of last resort. BT was an offshoot of the Post Office, a service that is run by the government even in the USA. BP was government controlled for...geopolitical reasons.

pjc503• 8 months ago

The key is competition. BP compete on the global oil market. BA compete freely with other air companies. RR with other turbine manufacturers (not many of those globally!).

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.

halo• 8 months ago

BT was only successful if you take a very narrow view of success. They dragged their heels on rolling out ADSL to maximise short-term profits from ISDN which has had a hugely negative effect on the country.

Government spent decades figuring out how to regulate it and even today OpenReach is far than ideal.

immibis• 8 months ago

Surely it depends on how you measure success. I'm sure a lot of politicians got very rich, so that's a success from their point of view.

gwbas1c• 8 months ago

But but but... Someone got rich! Thus it has to work. (And if privatization doesn't work, we'll just repeat that it works over and over until people believe that it works.)

edent• 8 months ago

It depends on what you count as a success.

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.

jhonof3• 8 months ago

CDPQ has been good at making transit in Canada, but they are working on behalf of the Quebec Pension Plan so it's kind of a weird situation. I largely agree with you.

wtcactus4• 8 months ago

Depends. According to BBC & Friends, or according to reality?

sschueller• 8 months ago

You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow.

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.

hshdhdhj44443• 8 months ago

Italy has seen tremendous success with privatizing High Speed rail.

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.

enaaem• 8 months ago

In the Japanese model the rail company also owns land around the station, so they capture more of the value of rail transport. Rail in the UK does not capture all the value it delivers, so subsidies would be a pragmatic solution.

epolanski5• 8 months ago

In many European countries trains do make money.

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.

corimaith• 8 months ago

Railway privatization is resolved in East Asia where they are also major real estate developers that plop luxury malls and apartments ontop stations. See the HK MTR as an example, which is far better than the average European subsidized metros.

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.

Hilift• 8 months ago

No. The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, and families with three or more children poverty rate of 47%. The cost of benefits and other costly boondoggles compete with these failed public works ventures. The largest water utility has £20 billion debt and will probably need to be un-privatized. They probably breathe a sigh of relief knowing that France is twice as bad financially, so that feeds the denial mass delusion. And the economy doesn't have the fantasy growth that was expected, so automatic additional borrowing. And it's budget season. Yay!

exasperaited4• 8 months ago

The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US,

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.

hshdhdhj44443• 8 months ago

Yay Brexit!

dickiedyce2• 8 months ago

LOL. Yes, Scottish Water was never privatised, and that's been a great story of success... even if it's only because it's not any of the failed English water companies.

giraffe_lady• 8 months ago

Yeah I was going to say. Every one of these privatizations was a success from the point of view of the people who made them happen. They weakened worker power and increased the amount of money available to be extracted by the wealthy. If they happened to also make these important systems worse, well, that's our problem.

exasperaited4• 8 months ago

No. Because privatising natural monopolies always creates unwelcome outcomes for everyone except the new shareholders.

tialaramex4• 8 months ago

I'm the wrong person to try to steelman this, but lets have a go anyway with a couple I know well:

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

Peanuts99• 8 months ago

I live in the UK and would have to agree with these two. LLU was very successful but also forcing Open reach infrastructure like ducting to be used by Altnet companies such as Cityfibre who want to build out their own networks. I'm with a very small ISP too (Idnet - wonderful company), who provide a fast reliable service over FTTP for less than £26 a month.

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.

threemux• 8 months ago

In the US, some have failed, some have worked. In my home state of Maryland, the PPP (P3) for redeveloping the Travel Plazas along I-95 is often cited as a success story and they are indeed widely considered top notch rest stops. It's a small-ish thing, but it did work.

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.

panick21_6• 8 months ago

There have been lots of privatizations all over the Western world and most are not well known, its the negative examples that are very much talked about. And many or most are somewhere between fully private and fully public anyway, so the picture is much more muddy. I think to say its all a failure would be very reductive.

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.

faidit• 8 months ago

The New Economic Policy in Soviet Russia (1921) and Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up in China (1980s) both saw privatizations and significant economic improvement. But those were corrections of rare cases of having way too much (ie, near-absolute) state control, where even stuff like private barbers had been illegal. That said, in the case of Russia of course, wider privatization in the 1990s was disastrous in many ways

Ray20• 8 months ago

in the case of Russia of course, wider privatization in the 1990s was disastrous in many ways

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.

simgt2• 8 months ago

Does any country have any success stories?

Apparently South Korea is doing pretty well with its healthcare: financing is public, service delivery is private (but heavily regulated).

cmrdporcupine• 8 months ago

That's the same model we have in Canada here mainly. Provinces pay for the service, but family doctors and most other practitioners are private businesses that then bill the government based on a set fee schedule.

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.

blibble• 8 months ago

telecoms, wired broadband is competitive and has variety of different levels of service at different price points

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

indoordin0saur• 8 months ago

Hong Kong is considered to have the best subway system in the world and it is private and for-profit. Though the largest shareholder of its stock is the Hong Kong government.

p_l2• 8 months ago

In many countries that is considered a state-owned business

guywithahat• 8 months ago

One could argue the rails were a success. The article argues deaths went up after privatization, but that's only because the miles being ridden went up significantly as well. Actual deaths per mile are down. Further the drop in ridership in 2021 was due to covid, and the financial strain was caused largely by the rail industry re-investing heavily before covid.

hylaride• 8 months ago

Does any country have any success stories?

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.

n1b0m• 8 months ago

The privatisation of the water industry in the UK certainly wasn’t and is considered a failure due to rising bills, poor infrastructure, and severe pollution from sewage overflows.

sandbags• 8 months ago

I'd argue that privatising telecomms has been a win. I think because it's quite open to competition (even if there has been a good deal of consolidation).

The challenge with so many UK privatisations is that the idea of real alternatives/competition ranges from laughable to extremely laughable.

purple_turtle• 8 months ago

Some communist era enterprises failed (or would have failed) on open market and entirely deserved this.

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.

ahmeneeroe-v2• 8 months ago

Very fair question. Let's also consider the inverse. Are there any modern government run success stories in Britain?

andy_ppp• 8 months ago

All things where you can't have genuine competition are a disaster.

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.

constantcrying3• 8 months ago

Does any country have any success stories?

Both Airbus and Volkswagen were set up by Governments. T-Mobile is arguably quite successful.

retube• 8 months ago

British Airways?

DrBazza2• 8 months ago

British Telecom. Party lines and waiting a couple of months to be connected were part of the fun times in the 70s.

Imagine having one mobile phone provider.

wtcactus4• 8 months ago

I hear these stories about UK private rail system being terrible for more than a decade now. But, truth is, I go there frequently and the times I had to use it it was quite fine. Lots of trains and they arrived on time (and they were fairly clean).

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).

drcongo2• 8 months ago

(Nearly?) all of the the "private" rail operators in the UK are actually the national operators of other countries - Germany, France, Italy and I think Netherlands. The national rail operators mostly know how to run a decent service, but in the UK passengers pay multiples of what those operators charge in their home country and the service is definitely not as good.

martinald8• 8 months ago

You are aware National Express (UK company) operates a lot of train routes in NRW in Germany, too? Equally Ariva (UK company, was owned by DB, now UK) in the Netherlands?

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.

phobotics• 8 months ago

I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country. There's some annoying things like having to go to a hub to go back the way you came sometimes. But without a sprawling expensive network that's somewhat unavoidable. And obviously some lines are worse than others re delays and cancellations.

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.

graemep8• 8 months ago

I prefer rail but public transport is very limited where I live, in Cheshire, and it is very expensive. It is fast for long distances, but it is a lot more expensive than driving, especially if you have more than one person in the car.

hexbin01010• 8 months ago

I think a lot of people in the UK would agree with this. It's not perfect but the rail system on the whole is pretty great for getting around the country

In the South East, or if you're employer is paying for 1st class, definitely agree.

jermaustin1• 8 months ago

I also go there rather frequently (much more before covid, though), and agreed, compared to the rail I'm using in the US (NYC, Boston, Amtrak), it is pretty good, but I've had some VERY bad experiences on it.

As a whole though, at least out of major cities London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, the rail system is great.

pm2153• 8 months ago

I think there's a couple of things about typical foreign experiences of UK public transport to note (some of this may not apply to you in particular, of course):

(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.

tialaramex4• 8 months ago

London is particularly notable because it escaped forced privatisation of e.g. bus services. In London all the buses are red and work the same. You do not care whether your bus is a "Big Corp" bus or a "Tiny New Outfit" bus, they're both red, they both take Oyster, or credit cards or whatever, they're the same, the bus service is controlled by Transpot for London which responds to an elected Mayor. In most UK cities by contrast there are multiple, privately owned bus companies. The local government can try to persuade them to run services it wants but they don't have to, and indeed if the local government won't do what they want they can just fold up the service and go home, too bad, the government have to contract with a for-profit business and if nobody wants to do it then too bad no buses.

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.

graemep8• 8 months ago

The government funding is interesting. It excludes HS2 for one thing.

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.

haritha-j• 8 months ago

the service is often plagued by strikes, but the real problem is the cost. In what universe does it make sense for the train to be more expensive than a single person driving?

hardlianotion2• 8 months ago

Without commenting on the sense thing, the user is being asked to pay for upgrading the infrastructure of the railways.

Symbiote3• 8 months ago

Rail travel is one of the few things that's cheaper now I live in Denmark compared to the UK.

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.

bluehatbrit• 8 months ago

I live in a city in the UK and use the train to commute daily. Return travel on a peak train costs me £8.40 (arriving at work before 9am), and £6.50 if I go in after peak (arriving at work after 9am).

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.

aembleton2• 8 months ago

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.

That £8.40 will be £6.30 after claiming the delay repay for 30 minute delay. Only happening 30% of the time so that would work out to £7.77

Still it would be better if they were always on time.

rsynnott5• 8 months ago

British trains are _terribly_ expensive, and get cancelled a lot, has been my general impression (from next door in Ireland, another country with a notoriously bad rail system, though it is at least cheapish).

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…)

hexbin01010• 8 months ago

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.

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!)

martinald8• 8 months ago

It's too confusing but you can always buy an any operator ticket. On that route you have these options for anytime travel.

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.

williamdclt• 8 months ago

Mostly repeating what others have said but...

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

hexbin01010• 8 months ago

Which part of the UK out of curiosity?

wtcactus4• 8 months ago

Around Manchester.

slightwinder2• 8 months ago

Similar problem with "Deutsche Bahn" in Germany. Probably also the reason why this German political NGO is writing this article. Are there any other countries with similar problems or history in their public transportation-systems?

panick21_6• 8 months ago

Privatization in Germany and Briain are completely different ...

graemep8• 8 months ago

It implies railways were les safe post privatisation. This is misleading. There were more accidents and deaths, but that was because of a huge increase in miles travelled. Deaths per billion kilometers fell consistently before and after privatisation.

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.

fergie3• 8 months ago

They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid

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.

RobinL• 8 months ago

Is that true? My understanding is they command very high wages because their unions are strong and they have a lot of leverage: by striking they can impose extremely high costs on the wider economy (not to mention bad press for politicians).

tialaramex4• 8 months ago

The idea is usually to de-skill workers and also to try to make their contractual terms worse.

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.

glenstein• 8 months ago

Definitely an interesting wrinkle. I wonder, though, if it's still cheaper to have extremely overworked but well paid staff, and few of them, versus adequate staff and normal pay.

noir_lord3• 8 months ago

Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots.

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.

tome7• 8 months ago

Hang on a minute. How do you square your claim that it's as it should be that train drivers can be paid as much as airline pilots, with your claim that everyone else is underpaid, including, presumably, airline pilots?

amelius• 8 months ago

But trains are inherently safer (or at least, they should be).

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.

terminalshort4• 8 months ago

A train may have more people on it, but it does have the luxury of being able to just stop when there is a problem. Airplanes not so much. Copenhagen has had an automated metro system for decades now. Train drivers aren't even strictly necessary anymore.

FuckButtons• 8 months ago

Well, that and people don’t keep on turning themselves into a red paste on the front of your server rack. I’ve heard some fairly harrowing stories from a train driver that made me think all the money in the world wouldn’t be enough to get me to do that job.

bluGill5• 8 months ago

Train drivers are mostly obsolete. More than 20 years ago full self driving trains became a reality in several areas. Since a train cannot stop if something is on the tracks anyway, we can ignore safety issues. The computer tells the track to switch, and then the train to go when the track is clear. When it is time to stop the computer stops, and the doors are exactly in the right place to align with the doors on the platforms.

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.

daedrdev• 8 months ago

I do not like this argument. Margins in most businesses are not very high. There is thus physically not enough cash to raise wages very much. Driving a train is less difficult than a plane, and trains have much worse margins due to lower ticket prices, so we should expect wages to be less.

lambdas• 8 months ago

They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid

I must be an engineer for a different Network Rail

oersted3• 8 months ago

There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder. I think it is reasonable for subsidies to be structured just like private investments rather than a donation. The public should reap the rewards of the money they invest in their country through taxes, just like wealthy investors do.

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.

jhonof3• 8 months ago

There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.

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.

exasperaited4• 8 months ago

There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.

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.

roguecoder• 8 months ago

That's interesting: it reminds me of the results we're seeing from workplace democracy in Germany.

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.

CGMthrowaway2• 8 months ago

There is a middle ground that is quite common across Europe: a private company that has the government as a shareholder.

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

nandomrumber5• 8 months ago

Where are these mythical countries you proclaim to have well managed public services and utilities?

johnjames87• 8 months ago

Great reply

TheOtherHobbes• 8 months ago

This is incorrect. The biggest accidents - Potters Bar, Hatfield, Southall - happened in the years immediately after privatisation, before passenger numbers had grown much.

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.

xnorswap• 8 months ago

I remember reading an article in the journnal of the RSS about whether it was actually less safe or whether it was just statistical clustering.

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.

LexiMax• 8 months ago

This is the pattern behind all UK privatisation. Foreign countries and shareholders benefited hugely, while prices of essential services exploded, and service quality degraded.

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?

dash25• 8 months ago

I'm in the UK and services seem worse to me. I also remember pre-privatization British Rail. It was unbelievably awful.

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...

fransje262• 8 months ago

The biggest disaster of privatisation was the loss of more than a century of engineering and management culture and knowledge.

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.

card_zero• 8 months ago

From the start, in 1994, there was this arbitrarily imposed structure with Railtrack owning all the track, and all the private companies leasing. The original plan was that this Railtrack thing would be publicly funded, and that's where that structure came from. Slowly over three years, then, the railway went private. Railtrack wasn't private until 1996. Then the railway was "properly private," but not really, because of this track-monopoly structure imposed on it by legislation, Railtrack being in effect government-run and a "private" company somehow too. Five years later (2001) there was bankruptcy, administration and re-nationalization of Railtrack (into "Network Rail") anyway.

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.

Aloisius• 8 months ago

The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.

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).

Reason0775• 8 months ago

”The UK invented tilting train technology, and it was given away to foreign corporations instead of being licensed and exploited in the UK.”

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.

johnnyanmac• 8 months ago

Yeah that sounds about right. I can't think of many situations where privatizing safety critical operations hasn't ended in disaster. Safety at that point ceases to be a priority and just another number on the sheet to crunch. If the lawsuit is cheaper than the savings from cutting corners, that's the move to make.

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.

wasmainiac• 8 months ago

Sources? This just sounds like union busting propaganda. “Trust it’s bad”

woodpanel3• 8 months ago

This is misleading

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.

iso16315• 8 months ago

HS2 is nothing to do with the nationalised rail maintenance, that's just an example of the inability for the UK (and indeed most of the western world) to build large projects, a lot of corruption, a lot of outsourcing, and an infinite money tap.

Dennip• 8 months ago

Something you are not accounting for is that rolling stock is fully private still, and a huge huge chunk of the profits. Operators don't make much money, the govt owns and runs the rails themselves, but the rollling stock is where a lot of the money goes

Reason0775• 8 months ago

“It is not efficiently run (see HS2!).”

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!

dijit2• 8 months ago

This is incorrect on all counts and it strikes me as scary that its the top comment.

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.

TriangleEdge• 8 months ago

How does the govt pick executives or companies for owning the railways?

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.

dickiedyce2• 8 months ago

As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencekirk). But still plenty more to do. I visit the south semi-regularly, and worked in London in the 90's. Rail around London seems to have really improved over the last few years. Swiss Rail (SBB) is still the poster child for a decent rail system. Clean, on time, reasonably priced (compared to UK rail), and easy to use. What was eye-opening for me was recent travel in Germany (München to Basel in CH)... DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair.

arethuza3• 8 months ago

Scotrail was shockingly bad when Abellio were running it - much better now and certainly much better than the likes of Avanti West Coast...

mentalgear• 8 months ago

Fun fact: DB (Germany public-private national rail company) has become one of the UK's biggest train service providers - even the Queen's train was under their service.

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.

luesterklemme• 8 months ago

DB Schenker was sold recently. So your point is not entirely correct anymore. Also yes, it did invest tax payer money but was profitable doing so.

trelane• 8 months ago

the very poor train service in [Germany]

Amtrak has entered the chat.

(It was originally scheduled to enter the chat at 2:42 AM, but was delayed until 6:01 AM.)

woodpanel3• 8 months ago

Just looked through DB's annual report. There's no mentioning of any passenger rail operations in UK. It's "just" DB Cargo. So I don't understand what this "fact" has anything to do with passenger transportation in Germany.

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.

wongarsu• 8 months ago

DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair

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

ixtli3• 8 months ago

This is great to hear.

brianmcc• 8 months ago

Plus the Scottish Govt have removed the peak/off-peak ticket split, everything is now priced at off-peak - i.e. cheaper - rates.

Doesn't necessarily impact season ticket holders but it's been a pretty good move for the most part, and a well received change.

insane_dreamer4• 8 months ago

It's a mystery to me how Germany, known for its high efficiency in many industries, cannot get the trains to run on time. It's almost as bad as Italy.

thebruce87m• 8 months ago

My wife uses ScotRail to commute and has no complaints. Yes, there’s the usual weather related stuff but nothing too bad. She probably has the same number of issues with her commute as I do by car - my journey was twice as long tonight as the road was covered in chickens after a crash.

abracos• 8 months ago

For context: The website is called Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish and naturalised-German Marxist theorist and revolutionary. A very biased source

niek_pas• 8 months ago

Politically colored ≠ biased

istultus• 8 months ago

Bias - an inclination of temperament or outlook [1]

Politically colored = an inclination of outlook

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bias

dddw2• 8 months ago

Tot have a certain political angle does not imply a bias by definition

slightwinder2• 8 months ago

Everyone is biased by definition. Knowing in which direction someone drifts and how strong they move supports your media literacy.

naIak• 8 months ago

Post a right-wing source, get flagged in minutes. Post literal Communist rhetoric, get to the front page with lots of excuses in between.

htk• 8 months ago

Absolutely, I flagged this post for this very reason. Far left or right websites are no place to get a reliable account of things.

lysace• 8 months ago

It's so insane that communism always gets a pass. I feel for the victims of that insane ideology.

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.

arpinum• 8 months ago

I'm undecided if privatisation was a failure. I don't know the counterfactual scenario well enough. The article paints a picture that British Rail was doing just fine, making all capital investments necessary, and at low taxpayer cost. I'm somewhat skeptical that it would continue like that for 30 years. Any better analysis?

FridayoLeary• 8 months ago

The central claim of the article makes sense. Tickets are too expensive and that's all i care about as a consumer. I don't agree with many of the authors arguments and his proposed solutions.

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?

martinald8• 8 months ago

Well it didn't work great in the 90s. There's a great documentary about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJfaKKVS5Hc from 1990. The problems will seem very similar.

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.

hardlianotion2• 8 months ago

It's really an open question - UK's railways were in a poor state & lacking investment when they were handed over. Rail journeys and infrastructure investment did increase in the intervening period.

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.

Wildgoose• 8 months ago

I remember that the UK was forced to privatise Rail in the way that it did because of EU competition rules. I was commuting by Rail at the time and the manner in which it was privatised was considered to be barmy by both myself and fellow passengers.

owisd• 8 months ago

This is just another “bendy bananas”-tier myth. The UK was never forced to privatise because of EU competition rules, see, for example, France, an EU member state that retained publicly owned railways during the same period.

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.

martinald8• 8 months ago

Not true. The EU is taking Netherlands to court for not allowing private companies (not state owned) to bid on the main passenger routes: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

De facto it is required, and you see that in Germany - many routes are not operated by DB anymore.

epolanski5• 8 months ago

Privatization in Europe, otoh, is going okay-ish.

junga• 8 months ago

Seriously can't tell if sarcastic or not.

epolanski5• 8 months ago

It's not. Spain, France and Italy have private operators and they are doing fine.

shevy-java• 8 months ago

Depends - some got wealthier. :)

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.

martinald8• 8 months ago

This just isn't true on any measure (apart from affordability and true high speed penetration in some countries).

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.

short_sells_poo2• 8 months ago

I'd argue that subsidizing the railway system from the taxes is inherently a better way to pay for it. In the UK, the trains are ridiculously expensive out of pocket. They are vastly more expensive than in Switzerland (a really high CoL country), which as you say is a much better run system at the same time.

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.

iggldiggl8• 8 months ago

The other is some of the ticketing options

And despite privatisation, a national fare system with through ticketing between operators was maintained.

ponco• 8 months ago

The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly. I look at the Australian NBN as a great example of a project that is not economical for a private business to entertain - it requires "The Government" to build. How do we reason with this in the capitalist system?

hexbin01010• 8 months ago

The privatisation of the commons will endure as our generations' greatest folly

Things really went downhill after 1773 (first Inclosure Act)

endoblast• 8 months ago

I miss being able to spontaneously buy a ticket and travel off to see a friend in another town or city. I did quite a lot as a young man with the help of my 'young person's railcard'. The cost would be prohibitive nowadays because only tickets bought well in advance are cheap.

tompagenet2• 8 months ago

As always this is grossly oversimplifying. As well as the misleading safety stats, as graemep has noted, it ignores that journeys just absolutely exploded under privatisation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail]

pjc503• 8 months ago

That certainly happened, but at the same time the ticket prices have consistently gone up above inflation, so what we're missing is the causal link - why did journeys go up so much? Was it in fact other transport policy to get commuters out of cars?

xboxnolifes• 8 months ago

Thats irrelevant to the safety statistics.

welshwelsh• 8 months ago

Ticket prices going up is actually good for mass adoption. If they are too low, you will see people riding the train who are only using the train because they are too poor to afford a car. That makes middle class people want to avoid the train.

Also higher revenue often means better service, which for most people is more important than the price.

dcel2• 8 months ago

Graham Dennis (author of the article) absolutely does not ignore this. He regularly points out that Irish rail ridership exploded almost in lockstep with GB rail network growth despite remaining entirely publicly run. Even right at the top of this article he points out that the growth had begun long before privatisation. He goes into a lot more detail in his book.

qcnguy12• 8 months ago

The growth didn't happen long before privatization in the UK though. It turned around almost exactly when the privatization process started (which wasn't an immediate overnight event).

rsynnott5• 8 months ago

Possible complicating factor is that at about the same time Irish Rail started experimenting with radical new concepts like having trains that were not from the early 1960s, and having more than one commuter line in the entire country. So possibly hard to read too much into it; there’s an argument that Irish journeys just went up because the system was becoming rapidly less terrible.

(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.)

ixtli3• 8 months ago

The worst UK accidents happened immediately after the initial push to privatize which resulted (in part) in the hybrid situation that exists today.

DrBazza2• 8 months ago

You mean the Harrow, Lewisham and Hither Green accidents in the late 50s and 1960s under British Rail?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_in_the_...

KaiserPro3• 8 months ago

The problem with this assement is that it misunderstands the role of the private sector.

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.

VBprogrammer2• 8 months ago

I'm just not convinced that privatisation of natural monopolies is ever sensible. Especially when failure isn't option, you can't just stop the trains running because some operator spent all of their budget on executive bonuses. It's privatised profits and public liability.

skippyboxedhero3• 8 months ago

You can see that it is highly effective even within the UK. Ofgem publish components of the energy price, of the average annual cost of £1300 I recall that profit was £40. Government subsidies are now £200-300 and are growing (I believe I read a story the other day that said that if the wholesale cost of energy fell to zero over the next few years, the cost of energy would not fall...that is how expensive the government's corporate subsidies to high-cost suppliers is...for some reason, no-one talks about this).

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).

ndsipa_pomu2• 8 months ago

England's water companies are a classic example of why you don't want a natural monopoly to be privatised.

insane_dreamer4• 8 months ago

lack of effective governance is the hidden crisis here

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)

KaiserPro3• 8 months ago

by adding profit-seeking

apart from in this instance, the amount of profit was dictated by the government as part of the franchise.

skippyboxedhero3• 8 months ago

For some reason, people also tend to ignore the many other cases where this is also true: telecoms, energy, water, etc.

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).

usrbinbash3• 8 months ago

All privatizations of public infrastructur and services are failures, simply due to the discrepancy between the interests:

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.

kingstoned• 8 months ago

Why would public ownership deliver those benefits? Walmart is delivering cheap, quality and reliable service in retail. Soviet stores we not better than American ones.

usrbinbash3• 8 months ago

Let's see: Is Walmart a utility provider, or a retailer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart

Walmart Inc.[a] is an American multinational retail corporation

drstewart• 8 months ago

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.

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.

usrbinbash3• 8 months ago

Time to retract your entire little rant.

https://techrights.org/n/2025/08/22/Enshittification_of_Airp...

You were saying?

ianburrell• 8 months ago

Air travel wasn't provided by the government before deregulation. The airlines have always been private companies. They were heavily regulated and run as public utility. Deregulation increased competition but nothing was privatized, the CAB was eliminated.

Air travel is also not privatized these days. The airports are nearly all owned by government entities.

iggldiggl8• 8 months ago

Competition dynamics for air traffic are different. Railway infrastructure can only support a very limited number of competing companies before you run out of capacity, and especially on classic mixed traffic routes it is very easy to run out of capacity. Once that happens, rail operators have to start competing for paths instead of directly for passenger, which can definitely lead to misalignment of incentives.

On top of that, there's the problem that it's physically impossible to run competing services at exactly the same time. This means that for customers with schedule constraints (i.e. you need to arrive somewhere specific by a certain time at latest), competition becomes much less effective, because you're no longer able to freely choose among the competing operators, but are instead forced to simply take the train that arrives at the right time.

A similar thing is for journeys that involve changes of trains – it's physically impossible to have attractive connections (i.e. without hanging around the station for ages) between more than one or at most (if that) two operators per route, because trains running along the same line always have to be separated by at least two or three minutes.

With air traffic it's different. While airport and air space capacity isn't quite unlimited, it's still not as limited in the way a mixed traffic railway is. Plus a much higher proportion of air traffic is holiday traffic and other long-distance journeys where even a few flights per day would be considered frequent service, so competition is much less limited by that fact.

mhh__3• 8 months ago

This is only "true" because anything run efficiently by the private sector is so demonstrably better than any communist-fantasy alternative that no one bothers arguing any more.

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

iggldiggl8• 8 months ago

May be of note also that the best train in London (the Elizabeth line) is run by a tendering process

But that tendering is just internal between the state and the operator – fares and service levels on the other hand are set by TfL (and probably also the DfT to some extent, especially on the GEML and GWML sections).

baklazan2• 8 months ago

RegioJet is a much better and cheaper service than the state-operated rail service.

jwblackwell• 8 months ago

A lot of people in the UK seem to think the trains in Europe are so much better, but that's not the case, at least in my experience. We took an interrail trip a couple of years ago and spent half the time sat on the floor and waiting for delayed trains. If anything, the overall experience was much worse than trains in the UK, especially if you factored in the difficulty in procuring the correct tickets.

andriamanitra• 8 months ago

Talking about "trains in Europe" as one thing doesn't really capture the complexity of the system – it varies a lot between different countries and operators. For example Swiss trains (SBB) are extremely reliable but Deutsche Bahn is famously unreliable.

fmajid• 8 months ago

As opposed to the privatization of water utilities, which was such a resounding success?

akpa1• 8 months ago

Both can be a laughable failure at once!

jmyeet• 8 months ago

Two legacies from the 1980s and 1990s that haunt us to this day are:

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.

teekert4• 8 months ago

Our Dutch one is too (privatized in 1995, it's one of our biggest employers as well), we have a nice railway system but the car is generally cheaper, even when using it alone. It's always about how much money the railway system is loosing, but I don't see anybody crying about the money our roads are loosing. Isn't it all just transport infrastructure?

hexbin01010• 8 months ago

Maastricht-Amsterdam, a 2.5 hour journey, day return, with NS Flex Dal Voordeel (ie off peak) is 37.44 EUR.

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?)

teekert4• 8 months ago

Yeah that's in off-hours, where you get 40% off. So that means it's much more expensive when you need to get to the office during office hours. And your office is not next to the station.

Certainly there are times when it is worth it, and for example 's Hertogenbosch - Amsterdam has a train every 10 min. That is hard to beat. But NS is under a lot of pressure and will get more and more expensive and less attractive as a result.

elAhmo2• 8 months ago

How would you quantify the money lost by roads?

teekert4• 8 months ago

Same as for railroads.

etothepii• 8 months ago

so that decisions about the railways we use are made closer to us

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.

yanhangyhy• 8 months ago

so.. whats the future for the infamouss HS2 project?

ixtli3• 8 months ago

If only someone could have predicted this.

MrBuddyCasino• 8 months ago

When I'm looking for politically unbiased news, I make sure to visit the fine internet presence of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

deafpolygon• 8 months ago

Public transportation needs to be a public cost, paid for and funded by tax payers and not for profit. When transportation is subsidized but privately owned, then you will see maintenance neglected in an effort to raise shareholder value.

SoftTalker2• 8 months ago

Public transit in the way we are used to it also cannot be run "for profit".

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.

dghlsakjg3• 8 months ago

This all hinges on people utterly ignoring the expense of maintaining the road system.

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.

mhh__3• 8 months ago

in an effort

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

hexator• 8 months ago

The only rail privatization success story, that being the rail system in Japan, for some reason is not replicated much elsewhere. You make money on development, not running trains. You will never make money on public transportation, nor should you—it's a public service.

avelis• 8 months ago

Agreed. Transportation is a public service and economic engine. Subsidizing travel to help supply travel to demand is the easiest and likely most affordable thing we can do to ensure economic volume.

petcat• 8 months ago

You will never make money on public transportation, nor should you—it's a public service.

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.

baklazan2• 8 months ago

It's not the only one. Czech private rail companies are also a huge success.

mhh__3• 8 months ago

abject failure

Other than a huge explosion in the number of people using trains? literally Chernobyl-on-wheels

piqufoh• 8 months ago

Apparently if a light-bulb blows at a station, two different contractors need to be called - one company has a contract for replacing consumables while another has a contract for repairing faults.

https://youtu.be/bNEEJX0VM6k?si=1hGCnYx826ffGOPj

ml-anon• 8 months ago

Couple of decades late with this news…

christkv• 8 months ago

Me and a friend decided to dig into who makes the money here and in the end the big earners are the private equity companies that own the rolling stock and leases it out to the rail companies. The actual rail companies have slim margins. The leasing companies had much bigger profit margins.

iso16315• 8 months ago

In the 1980s the nationalised railway was considering closing London Marylebone.

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.

aembleton2• 8 months ago

you can walk up to the station and get a train from Manchester to London for £50 return taking about 3h30

To get that price, I've always had to change at Crewe, or buy well in advance. Otherwise, it's £114 return.

iso16315• 8 months ago

Sure, change at Crewe.

Back in BR days it cost £45.50 off peak (over £100 today inflation wise) and took about 3 hours, but sure you didn't have to change.

rurban• 8 months ago

The German even more. When it was already clear that the British privatization completely failed.

And we saw what the others did in the meantime. Swiss, Austrian, China, all huge success stories. Without privatization

anikom15• 8 months ago

The only issue I have with British rail is the expense. Otherwise, seems rather well done. Much better overall experience than I had with DB at least.

constantcrying3• 8 months ago

Germany failed to privatize its Railways (it is still 100% owned by the state and directly financed through taxes) and it has an abysmal, totally dysfunctional railway system.

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?

matt-p• 8 months ago

It's interesting; the current state of the railways is clearly a complete joke but 10-15 years ago, my perception at least, was that it was basically a OK and working system. The stats are only a bit worse now than they were then, I wonder why the massive perception gap.

2014 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proportion-of-tra... Now https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passeng...

stretchwithme• 8 months ago

And, yet, railroads were privately created and operated before government got control of them.

Subways too.

dave333• 8 months ago

Privatisation was awful from the traveller's point of view having to figure out which company to deal with. It would have been much better to micro-privatise each train - selling off the dining car franchise to a commercial operator or allowing a commercial company to add a coach to a train for a given fee.

aussiegreenie• 8 months ago

Privatisation of everything is an abject failure.

Nimitz14• 8 months ago

This is clearly a partisan website (see its name). Read with a large grain of salt.

aubanel• 8 months ago

Other sources indicate that privatization was a huge success!

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_...

iggldiggl8• 8 months ago

despite taxpayer money investment logically dropping

Did it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GB_Rail_Subsidy,_1985-201...

paints a slightly more complex picture.

amai• 8 months ago

Don‘t privatize infrastructure monopolies. There is simply not enough consumer choice and therefor not enough competition in the market, so companies would be punished for failures or rewarded for improvements and optimizations. Ultimatively capitalism is an optimization algorithm, but in can only work well, if objective functions are clear.

Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

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