From the start, in 1994, there was this arbitrarily imposed structure with Railtrack owning all the track, and all the private companies leasing. The original p

From the start, in 1994, there was this arbitrarily imposed structure with Railtrack owning all the track, and all the private companies leasing. The original plan was that this Railtrack thing would be publicly funded, and that's where that structure came from. Slowly over three years, then, the railway went private. Railtrack wasn't private until 1996. Then the railway was "properly private," but not really, because of this track-monopoly structure imposed on it by legislation, Railtrack being in effect government-run and a "private" company somehow too. Five years later (2001) there was bankruptcy, administration and re-nationalization of Railtrack (into "Network Rail") anyway. Lurking in the background the whole time was the RMT, the National Union of Rail [etc.] Workers, led by "communist/socialist" Bob Crow, a moderate in the union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Crow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Crow So if this is viewed as an experiment in private ownership, experimental conditions were extremely messy and any conclusions are invalidated by cultural complexities and compromises.