Privatisation of the rail in UK is a nightmare, the government is not holding the private sector to a high standard at all. High profit and High standard are barely compatible, I'm not sure they are even good examples in the world.
My local line / stations have been hugely upgraded over the period though I'm not sure you can put that down to privatisation. (Thameslink/Kings Cross St Pancras)
That statistic always gets used but it hides a lot of other macro trends and context. In North Irland you will see a grath that look the same without privatization.
Also lots of things that came together by privatization had been developed at BritishRail.
And anyway, it was only really private in the slights way. After just a few years networkrail had to be created. This was hugely costly and the infrastructure during the private time degraded.
After that the government had even more diect control over routes and timetables then they had under BritishRail.
Having the services themselves being run by private companies isnt all that interesting. The can only really innovate on underpaying employes and some user experiance.
And to get this part to be private, you have to have a whole army of lawyer on both sides. And then again between the service companies and the train rental companies.
The user experiance gain is completly negated by having a system that is so much harder to use in general. Every company with their own branding. Changing all the time when provider change.
Harder to do proper ticket integration and so on and so on.
Not to mention that during that period almost no new fleets were ordered so the majority of UK train manufacturing is gone. And the one that still there makes subpar trains that don't compte with the trains from France, Germany and Switzerland.
In summation, I would say privatisation didnt really save the UK much money, arguebly it cost them money.
And now privatisation is done anyway because all the franchises are simply controlled by the government anyway.
Allowing BritishRail to continue to develop into something like the Swiss SBB would have been much better for Britain.
Comming from Switzerland travling by train in Britain felt like time travling to an earlier age. There is some fancy knew stuff on the most important routes. But travling the country side in 40 year old trains and stopping at stations that look like nature was in the process of consuming them.
In Switzerland is expensive, but you get something for money. In England its expensive and so much worse in so many dimensions.
> Drivers for JR West face financial penalties for lateness as well as being forced into harsh and humiliating retraining programs known as nikkin kyōiku (日勤教育, "dayshift education"), which include weeding and grass-cutting duties during the day. The final report officially concluded that the retraining system was one probable cause of the crash. This program consisted of severe verbal abuse, forcing the employees to repent by writing extensive reports. Many experts saw the process of nikkin kyoiku as punishment and psychological torture, not retraining
A 19 year old example doesn't seem great, surely things can change in 20 years.
Also that derailment was truly caused by surpassing the speed limit, which shouldn't even be possible (even more so today). Enforcing a speed limit by block is trivial. Which it looks like is what they did after.
Japan has a very different culture and a very different way to organize and finance everything. If you want yo copy their system you cant just cherry pick a single aspect and just assume it gone work the same way.
1. Compare and contrast the privately run phase of rail service with the public version before the early 90s. It was low-use by the public and in a decrepit state.
2. The form privatisation took in the UK kept the most expensive, old, difficult to maintain etc. parts of the rail networks under public control. You saw what happened (HS2) when that public control was actually used to improve the infrastructure.
... We'll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies, and whether you think you'll get what you want. I doubt it.
With 1) you're comparing apples to oranges and you're still wrong. The turnaround in rail use in the UK began in the 1980s before the private train operating companies got involved. And if you're referring to the network itself being in "a decrepit state" before and now being improved to the point where it can sustain higher capacities ... well you can thank Network Rail for that (note: not a private company). The TOCs are headed for nationalisation anyway, leaving the ROSCOs as the big privatisation "success" (in that they've extracted enormous profits while not exactly contributing anything particularly novel).
What we saw with HS2 is a large (and frankly completely necessary) engineering project getting fucked around with and repeatedly chopped down until it no longer satisfied its original plan (providing greater capacity for both local and national services by providing a new North-South line that happened to be "high-speed") and became exactly what those wielding the axe that killed it accused it of ("just a way for some to get to London slightly faster").
> We'll have to see what happens when MPs are suddenly setting budgets for rail companies
Good rail outcomes were obviously impossible under a Tory government regardless of how the control worked, but they might be possible under a Labour government. We'll have to see.
Privatisation of the rail in UK is a nightmare, the government is not holding the private sector to a high standard at all. High profit and High standard are barely compatible, I'm not sure they are even good examples in the world.