That's what happened in Germany. The rail system was made debt free, turned into a for-profit company, but kept in ownership of the federal government. Overall I'd say it's doing much better than a completely private system would.

In Canada CN Rail was made debt fee flogged for 2B on the stock market. After 30 years it's now worth much more, so it's been great for shareholders. But a lot of branch lines were cut, freight prices increased as much as possible, and there has been zero movement on passenger rail, both urban and Intercity (well, except Toronto bought a bunch of rails in their city, a tiny fraction of the CN Network for a significant fraction of the privatization gains..)

Privatizing monopolistic infrastructure doesn't usually work well.

> Privatizing monopolistic infrastructure doesn't usually work well.

There's the option of keeping the natural monopoly part (the rail network itself) in (semi-)public hands and then allowing private train operators to pay for time slots to run their trains on.

The counter-argument is that this creates a very complex interface between public and private, with lots of opportunity for grifting via misaligned incentives. And the experience in the UK doesn't seem that fantastic, with the most recent development being the state taking over much more responsibilities like designing timetables and ticketing, with the private train operators essentially reduced to providing the trains themselves and the train personnel.

Of course the EU is trying to recreate the UK model EU-wide, we'll see how that goes..

Privatizing operations is not privatiying a monopolistic infrastructure. Europe opened up rail services for competition in the 90s, although it took a long time for it to be implemented. There are different models being used throughout the EU, the UK's franchise-model isn't really used very much. One common model is that a regional public transit agency contracts out operations of different parts of regional rail networks to private (or possibly public) bidders, and it´s pretty transparent to the users -- since the regional transit authority will ensure common branding and ticketing. It´s not a very "dangerous" model, since the public maintains control over most aspects of the rail network that matter, it doesn't really privatize gains and socialize losses, it just sort of forces a race to the bottom on the profit margins of rail operators.

When an operator goes kaputt there's temporary pain. But now the models are moving even so far that the vehicles aren't even owned by the operators, but the local regional authorities -- so then the operators have little room for making profit, innovating or doing any sort of interesting shananigans. But it does force a lean operation, keeping costs in control.

> Privatizing operations is not privatiying a monopolistic infrastructure.

Indeed, which is precisely what I tried to explain in my parent comment.

> Europe opened up rail services for competition in the 90s, although it took a long time for it to be implemented.

For better or worse, in many countries it's still implemented on paper only. The incumbent state railways have fought long and in many cases successful rearguard actions to delay competition for as long as possible.

> There are different models being used throughout the EU, the UK's franchise-model isn't really used very much. One common model is that a regional public transit agency contracts out operations of different parts of regional rail networks to private (or possibly public) bidders, and it´s pretty transparent to the users -- since the regional transit authority will ensure common branding and ticketing.

Yeah, this is how many municipal or regional authorities tender out bus lines. I think it's also the model the UK railways are moving towards with the introduction of the (cringe) Great British Railways and the end of the franchising system (hastened by the covid crisis):

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/may/19/uk-rail-ove...

> It´s not a very "dangerous" model, since the public maintains control over most aspects of the rail network that matter, it doesn't really privatize gains and socialize losses, it just sort of forces a race to the bottom on the profit margins of rail operators.

OTOH, since essentially everything except the running of the actual trains is controlled by the state, there is precious little space for that purported private sector inventiveness and dynamism to make any impact. So what's the benefit instead of just the state directly owning everything and hiring people to run in?

Union busting?

Answering for my own country, the state railways which runs all passenger rail [1] (except for the capital city regional trains which are run via a tendering process similar to how bus services are run), and the state railways seem supremely uninterested in improving regional rail around other cities than the capital, despite interest from other regional transit authorities. With some "real" competition on the rails, other regional authorities could set up tendering for regional rail as well.

[1] Which comes back to the comment I made above about "on paper only". Yes, in principle other operators can operate on the network, but the state company just got a renewed decade long contract from the government to provide essentially all passenger rail service in the country - who's gonna compete with a heavily subsidized operation like that?

> The counter-argument is [...]

There's also the fact that trying to establish any serious amount of competition within a specific route pretty soon runs into capacity limitations, especially since open access operators seem to focus mostly on faster long-distance trains, meaning that on mixed-traffic railways they'll conflict with both freight and regional/local trains. To maximise the capacity of a route, you need to coordinate the schedules of the various trains, which is of course an anathema to the dogma of free, unrestrained competition.

Another thing is that since its impossible to offer direct connections from anywhere to anywhere, especially at anything like a reasonable frequency, the railway system must rely on connections. Attractive connections with not too long waits are only possible between a very limited number of trains. Something like the integrated clockface schedule in Switzerland works only because there's one set of long distance trains that need to be taken care of and integrated with the schedules of regional trains and even other non-railway public transport.

> Of course the EU is trying to recreate the UK model EU-wide, we'll see how that goes..

At least the UK kept a common ticketing system with through-ticketing still available from anywhere to anywhere, plus – albeit with some teething trouble – somewhen in the last decade or so they finally settled on accepting that split tickets purchased independently by a passenger in order to save some money should get the same protection in terms of passenger rights (most importantly: if you miss a connection through no fault of your own, the railway needs to accommodate you, i.e. the ticket remains valid on later trains, you get a taxi/hotel/… if it was the last train of the day, alternatively you have the right to abort the journey and claim a refund, etc. etc.) as through-tickets bought in one transaction.

In the recent EU passenger rights reform, the parliament did try mandating something similar re more through-ticketing, but a number of member states were apparently heavily opposed to this (unfortunately including Germany it seems), so sadly it was dropped…

> especially since open access operators seem to focus mostly on faster long-distance trains

Only long distance trains are mandated to be self-financing. Competing with local trains means competing with subsidized trains, which doesn't make any economic sense -- if you have a private operating company and want to run local trains, then compete in the bidding processes to get the subsidy to the run them. And they do -- in Germany, about 1/3 of local trains are privately operated. (Btw, for freight its 40%, for intercity trains its below 1%)

> Only long distance trains are mandated to be self-financing. Competing with local trains means competing with subsidized trains, which doesn't make any economic sense

Hmm yes, you're right of course. I guess my main beef is how parts of the political word are always saying "Open access competition is great and everything will be super with rainbows and unicorns" and mostly ignoring the fact that most corridors where open-access might be sort of viable are also already mostly full and any serious increase in the number of open access operators would wreak havoc on the schedules of the currently existing services, especially those of regional trains.

> It should be pointed out that privatization of JNR involved a lot of stuff! Regional breakups, the debt load, there's so much stuff going on there that assuming that privatization happened in an orthodox way is much more succumbing to propoganda than my statement.

I don't disagree. And I'd throw in the dissolution of the JNR labor unions that were preventing mass layoffs (some half of JNR's employees were laid off in the process of privatization) also heavily helped things.

Yeah that's a good point, union-busting is a qualitatively different strategy that is much less doable as a public institution. There's also some quantitative stuff around payment of the management class. I don't believe that you need to pay someone millions of USD for them to do a good job, but there are plenty of important jobs done by public servants that would benefit from simply paying people more and getting access to people trained up in private industry.

Seriously rotten union was one of a big reason for JNR privatization.