Rail mode share in Toyama, Japan, is only 4.2%--nonetheless, the Toyama Chiho Railway manages to operate there at a profithttps://twitter.com/uncriticalsimon/status/940627498131435520 …
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The Tube is operationally profitable, I think?
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good to know! my tweet was from a discussion with someone who insisted that railways in UK can't be expected to turn a profit
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The UK (and now European) privatization model is fundamentally broken, the railways don't own the tracks (or even the rolling stock??). They're not vertically integrated like Japanese railways
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I remember hearing that they didn't own the rolling stock and I nearly fell out of my chair
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It's very silly. It's more like a franchising model than anything else. The infrastructure owner used to be private, but then it went bankrupt and was nationalized
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I think you meant to say "it went bankrupt and was nationalized after a series of deadly crashes that resulted from their complete lack of desire/ability to maintain the tracks"
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Anyway, my sense is that the problem with making rail profitable in the UK is that rail is competing against huge public subsidies of the motorway network. I suspect the UK invested much more in roads than rail, whereas in Japan maybe it's more equal.
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Expressways in Japan are, like most of the railways, private businesses which pay for their upkeep through tolls. This certainly creates more of a level playing field, but I don't think it's the whole story.
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