[wolframhempel]

It was a privatization in name only. The German state held 100% of its shares since the beginning. As such, it might have no longer been subject to the state specific demands of hiring etc. - but instead found itself in an uneasy tension as the only supplier of services to an entity that was something between a customer and a shareholder.

Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

[toast0]

> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.

All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.

Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.

[solatic]

> capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition

Thirty years ago, you would be correct. In the modern day, you could tie switch signalling to real-time auctions and let private rail's command centers decide how much to bid and thus whether or not they win the slot for putting their cars onto the shared rails. The public rail owner likely needs to set rules allowing passenger rail to pay a premium to secure slots in advance (say, a week) so that a timetable can be guaranteed to passengers during peak rush hour, but off-peak slots can and should be auctioned to naturally handle the difference between off-peak passenger rail and not-time-sensitive, more-cost-averse freight rail.

[marxisttemp]

You can’t. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable level of special treatment by the state due to the monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure. Not everything needs to or should be privatized.

[airspresso]

This 100%. It should be seen as critical infrastructure because of everything it can enable when run well.

[1718627440]

> It was a privatization in name only.

Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.

[rawgabbit]

I believe modern economists are studying how ownership should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies and edge cases require an owner who has authority and whose interests align with the thing they control. And you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the previous owner is incompetent.

In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.

If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.

[riffraff]

keep the rails as a state-owned monopoly, let different train operators run on it. Basically we have that for airplanes, and it works well enough.