[delayed]

> Which brings up an interesting question: How do you structure something with a large piece of infrastructure like a rail network in a way that could benefit from the market forces of competition and innovation?

A rail network is near to a natural monopoly. You can build overlapping rail networks, but it's complex and interconnecting instead of overlapping would usually offer better transportation outcomes and there's a lot less gauge diversity so interconnection is more likely than overlap.

All that to say, you can't really get market forces on the rails. Rails compete with other modes of transit, but roads and oceans and rivers and air aren't driven by market forces either.

Transit by rail does compete in the market for transit across modes. You can have multiple transportation companies running on the same rails, and have some market forces, but capacity constraints make it difficult to have significant competition.

I believe modern economists are studying how ownership should be assigned. The thinking is that contracts and rules handle the majority of situations but emergencies and edge cases require an owner who has authority and whose interests align with the thing they control. And you want a mechanism to reassign ownership when the previous owner is incompetent.

In the case of a national train system, you may want to create a national entity to develop, coordinate, and make the physical trains and support technologies. You would create regional or metro entities to control the train network for their local area including the train stations. They coordinate with each other via negotiated contracts. Any edge cases or emergency falls under the purview of the owning entity. For example, the national entity controls the switch from diesel locomotives to the newest engine. The local authority is responsible for repairing the lines after a natural disaster.

If an entity is egregiously incompetent or failing, the national regulatory authority, with support of the majority of all the different train entities, takes control and reforms it.

> It was a privatization in name only.

Not, that "insight" again. Yes it was privatized and yes it is still completely owned by the state. "Privatization" is a term of art (in German) that refers to the corporate structure not the ownership. There are also public corporations in Germany, that are fully owned by random people: e.V. = registered association.

You can’t. Every attempt at privatizing rail is a failure with worse performance, higher prices, and an inevitable level of special treatment by the state due to the monopolistic utility-like nature of rail infrastructure. Not everything needs to or should be privatized.

>Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity

If I go to Zürich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get in Southern Germany for 15€ and in Berlin for 8€. That is with roughly the same quality.

I'd say past productivity leads to network effects and investments in one area that boost local salaries and decouples them quite strongly from current productivity.

My previous company had a per-dollar extremely unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there weren't at fault. You don't magically become more productive because you live next to SF.

You need a lot of infrastructure for trains (and a lot of it isn't even used all that much -- it's not like all rails have a train passing by every 5 minutes). You also can't get much use out of your rolling stock because the speeds are fairly slow. You also don't have the same flexibility as planes have regarding routes.

The upshot is that trains are a lot costlier than most believe think and most railway routes require state subsidies (with goods transport usually being an exception), whereas air traffic works so well it can be taxed heavily.

France, Italy, Austria (and probably others) don't have monopoly on long distance train. For instance, you can take a DB/Renfe/Trenitalia train on french high speed line, or in Austria take a Westbahn train instead of ÖBB.

That said personally I much prefer the mostly fixed pricing (and no reservation required) of swiss network than the dynamic one of other countries.

China and Switzerland seem to do fine with trains.

Immo being real estate (Immobilien), for the curious.

That's a different situation / scenario and addressed a different problem.

The government is the most efficient and effective at big capital spending and with what I would call static operations. Competitive private entities are the best at delivering value on the front-end.

Monopolist/cartel private entites combine the rapacious nature of rent seeking with the lazy inefficiency of bureaucracy to great a giant ball of failure. Effective privatization requires either creating a framework for a robust competitive landscape OR tight, effective regulatory control. There's no universal correct answer.

If competition is in place and companies can win or lose, they will move mountains to yield marginal gain. If you let them get fat & lazy, you will need to move a mountain to do anthing -- even make more money!

> After the reforms installations were quicker.

And everybody has the same "market" price.