@Peternimmo @jon Britain's rail is privatized and excessively regulated, which provides the worst of both worlds, imo. The strength of private actors is primarily that they can cancel unprofitable routes and therefore provide better service/cost on profitable ones. If this is not permitted then I'm not sure what the point of privatization is
@Peternimmo @jon @tormeh Britain’s network has already been nationalised - just delivered by private contractors. Still, that’s a huge difference from franchising - but one invisible to casual observers.
@tormeh @Peternimmo And no, they cannot cancel unprofitable routes, because it's all a sort of tendering model.
political rail views
@tormeh @Peternimmo @jon in the brief recent period where British #Rail was private and not regulated much, we had squabbles between operators sharing key stations, cross-country services always coming last (because it uses more "competitor" stations) and finally catastrophic maintenance failures causing derailments. So it got regulated more and restructured to reduce rail-rail competition. It seems there's much incentive for private rail to play beggar-thy-neighbour.
political rail views
@mjr @Peternimmo @jon I think it’s important to separate ownership of rail/stations from ownership of rail services/trains. The shared infrastructure of rail and stations is probably better off in public hands, as is normally done with roads, but train services should be a matter for the private sector
@tormeh @Peternimmo And *not very heavily subsidised* - which leads to costs for customers going up. BUT the level of service - in terms of the number of trains run and passengers transported - is higher now in the UK than it has been for decades. Timetables on most routes are good. Rolling stock is modern. Sure, the costs are horrid, but what's happening in the UK is not all bad.