Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure

> 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.

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…)

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.

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.

> It's not a stressful job and like you said they get paid pretty well

I’m curious as to the criteria there. A train driver must, surely, be more stressed than a software engineer? They’re in charge of a moving vehicle that carries hundreds of people. And yet software engineers will still often make more than train drivers do.