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Cog, I will venture that if you look at a mirror, you'll see a brick wall staring back.  You are dead set in avering that hauling passengers makes money for rail while hauling freight does not.  I'm sorry, but this runs against every accepted theory of transportation economics.  However, you did let the cat out of the bag by acknowledging that the whole system is subsidized, passsengers included.  Question:  If hauling passengers by rail makes money, why the subsidy? Question:  What type of "subsidy" is used to fund roads and rails?  If it is fuel taxes and lorrie fees that pay for roads, then that is not a subsidy, but a user fee.  A subsidy occurs when the beneficiary gets an earmark that was collected outside the actions of the said beneficiary. Over here, fuel taxes are around 40 cents at the federal level, and range from 12 cents to 40 cents at the state level, so total fuel taxes are usually no more than 20 to 25% of the market price of the fuel.  Over there, it is my understanding that fuel taxes are 100% or more of the market price of fuel.  Indeed, fuel taxes are used for generating revenue to your general funds, right?  So no matter how you slice it, 100% of your road expenditures come from fuel taxes. Now, stay with me on this.  I am assuming that the railroad subsidies also come from the fuel taxes.  That's subsidies for both the infrastructure entity and the 25 or so operating companies.  So what you guys have done is to tax the nominal road users onto the passenger trains, and in doing so you have ostensibly crowded out the freight users from using rail effectively.  So your freight moves by the less efficient mode than that predicated for moving freight in greater than lorrie-load quantities, and your citizenry moves by the less individualized mode that that predicated for individual freedoms, and apparently you have not found a way or a will to fit the one into the other for the economic benefit of your society. So what would happen if you guys decided to end all subsidies for rail, and only tax road fuel for use in the maintenance and development of your road system, like we do here in the States?  I think we both know what would happen - more people would opt to drive than to take the train as pump prices more closely reflect the market price of the fuel, and conversely more freight would opt for rail transport even over short haul distances over 300 km as those avenues open up. Why wouldn't that be a good thing?  I have a hunch what your reply will be, but still............ BTW - haven't you guys heard of bi-modal lorries?  Very low modal transfer costs, well adapted to short haul freight corridors.  I would think such technology would have taken off even more so over there than here in the States, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  Possibly because you've clogged your raillines with the less than optimal load factor inherent in passenger rail. BTW2 - If real time intramodal competition was deem "unworkable, inefficent, and stupid" according to the Ministry of Running Out of Negative Adjectives For Things We Haven't Even Tried Yet, what do you call the last decade or so of trying to change a nationalized integrated rail system into a privatized overly separated but exclusively franchised rail system?  You dogged the system you didn't even try, yet the one you guys did try wasn't exactly proof otherwise, was it?  Now you want to go to a privatized integrated rail system, one I bet will continue to drain the fuel tax fund for even more subsidies just so you guys can pay monopoly rail rates.  [8] The whole point of open access is to get that intramodal competition, yet you guys seemingly went out of your way just to prevent such intramodal competition, so it wasn't really open access, was it?  I guess Jay needs to change the title of the thread to "Trouble in less than open access paradise".
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