[sacredcows]

Rail in the U.S. is the best freight rail system in the world. Europe boasts a great passenger network but fares poorly when it comes to freight. For America to be great in both sectors, busy corridors should be dedicated to one use or the other (e.g. Northeast corridor, California, etc.). Success in having highly efficient freight systems and highly efficient passenger systems are pretty much orthogonal.

[jabl]

It has been claimed that Japan has the best privatized passenger railway system in the world; certainly it worked out much better than the UK experience. One reason being that the railways own the tracks and the stations (renting out some of the space, and having things like restaurants and hotels), and in built-up areas they can thus capture some of the value the railway provides through increased land values close to the stations. Apparently only about 50% of the income is from tickets.

Railway people also often say that railways are different from roads in that the advantages of vertical integration between the tracks and the rolling stock is much larger, and thus a privatization scheme where a single railway company owns both the tracks and the trains is better than the UK (and now EU following in the UK footsteps) model of splitting the ownership.