That's hardly related to privatisation though. Railways are not that profitable. The government could up subsidies if it wanted to to reduce ticket prices without nationalising the routes: it already enforces price controls.

One reason those routes are so expensive is that UK rail is in many regions frequently at or over capacity. Supply/demand does its thing until prices hit the caps. This is especially true around London. Price controls always cause shortages and in this case it's a shortage of seats and investment in capacity upgrades. Seems people prefer that to more expensive tickets or higher taxpayer subsidies.

Also the infrastructure is ancient - the steam locomotive was literally invented in the UK - and investment was largely abandoned during the decades of government ownership. The current railways often have infrastructure in them built a century ago.

Finally, some lines actually pay the government money rather than receive subsidies.

I don't think the UK position is wrong. It just means people who choose to use the railways instead of driving or moving pay more of the costs. Seems fair.

It's important to realise that the yearly price rises are almost all a result of subsidy dropping, and as peoplewindow says, many fares are already set by the government. Notably, the total premiums paid by the train operating companies (TOCs) now exceeds the amount of total subsidy, so for the first time since nationalisation, the railways are making an operational profit.

From memory, something like 4% of fare revenue ends up as profit going to the TOCs at the end of the year; for many, this isn't enough to buy a single extra train, yet alone anything bigger. The profits these private companies are taking aren't huge in terms of the costs of operating a railway!

That said...

> I don't think the UK position is wrong. It just means people who choose to use the railways instead of driving or moving pay more of the costs. Seems fair.

Surely that same argument should apply to driving? i.e., those using for the roads should pay more of the costs instead of it all coming out of general taxation?

They do. Fuel taxes pay for the costs of road maintenance and then a lot more on top (typically, rail subsidies!)

http://www.roadusers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/8.4-2...

The interesting thing in the UK is despite those high costs the network is running at capacity, people seem willing to pay the fares.

Given that is the case I think it's hard to justify extra subsidy for people who are clearly getting enough utility from the system.