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ninalanyon well, yes, sort of! The lines, stations and signalling etc are still state-owned by the services are run by private companies renting track access. They also hire the rolling-stock. So all told, a mess!
Prior to being nationalised into British Railways in 1948, I think it was, the railways were all privately-owned, in four huge conglomerates enforced by a government in the 1930s "Grouping" the many former separate companies. The big difference between them and indeed BR, and the present situation, was that they were self-contained. The "Big Four" and BR did use some contractors but generally they built, maintained and operated all their own locomotives, rolling-stock, track, signals, buildings, etc. themselves. It wasn't all perfect, nothing is, and it was desperately labour-intensive with working conditions that could be physically grim; but generally it worked well. No profits going off abroad. No importing trains we were perfectly capable of building in the country that invented the concept.
Oh, and anyone buying their electricity from EDF is propping up La Replique. Electricite de France (apologies for the missing accents) is owned by that country.
My water and drainage services are courtesy of a Malaysian hotels-developer and cement manufacturing group.
Chelsea FC has just been flogged off to some rich American after some years as the property of some rich Russian, though at least he did seem actually to be a fan of English football. Unlike the Wall Street spivs who wanted to cherry-pick several top-flight European and English football "clubs" and corall them in a hermetic pseudo-league, until the fans rightly told them to get lost.
Not far from me is a factory making that plaything of the "filthy-rich capitalist pig", the big luxury cruising boat. Oh the irony - after being in the hands of a bunch of Irish money-traders it now belongs to a nominal-company in... the hard-line Communist, People's Republic of China.
