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Italians may help Germany get its trains to run on time
(www.economist.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
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Privatisation always feels like a solution to shitty government services till some ultra rich company comes in, provides good service while burning cash, capturing the entire market forming a monopoly or duopoly, then raising the prices while making service shittier, and the government will say they can't do anything now because shutting them down would mean paralyzing the entire railway of the country.
If this feels oddly specific, it's because I've seen this happen with my own eyes, just not in the railway.
We're just getting to the end of this process with our rail infrastructure in the UK. The companies have spent absolutely no money on maintenance, and now everything's broken, and the only way to fix it is to buy everything back into public ownership, then spend a bunch of taxpayer money.
Trying to run infrastructure projects for profit is a stupid idea. The "profit" is a more dynamic economy facilitated by better transport links. It ain't going to be in the form of cash.
The UK's privitizaton model was crap because it mandated service and only allowed operators to compete on price paid to the UK government, ensuring that all operators were lowest bid and trying to spend the least money on running trains.
Divorcing running trains from maintaining track seems to work better on price since railroads owners are more incentivized to have more trains run on their tracks to gain revenue. However, this system seems to only be tested on rail systems with competent rail operators, which DB is not.
I do think that divorcing owning the tracks and owning the trains is something that should be forced on American rail companies.