[mcv]

It looks like it can work if you do everything right, but it can also go very wrong. I think you will always need a central party to coordinate stuff, because letting a bunch of profit-driven railroads arrange this amongst themselves sounds like a recipe for disaster. But that central organisation needs to be run very well, or you still get disaster. Having everything in the hands of a single party has obvious advantages, but also obvious disadvantages. Competition clearly works well enough in some countries, and not so well in others.

I think a thorough analysis of where it works and where it doesn't, and why, would be really interesting.