I believe the Japanese private rail companies also own the lines where their traffic is. This would explain a lot. There are other countries (including my native one) where the trains are run by one company and the lines are owned by another. This does.not.work. For what seems like obvious reasons. There's no economic gain for the owner of the infrastructure to spend money, quite the opposite in fact.

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Tiktaalik an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Many of these lines were built by the public, then privatized.

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KptMarchewa 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In every EU country the infrastructure company (companies) is separate from companies that operate trains, with some usually small exceptions.

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jabl 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most EU countries have adopted the approach of putting the infrastructure company and the public train company under the same holding company, which is sort-of the minimum that EU regulations demand. In practice, in many countries the previous national rail company (under whatever conglomerate structure it may be operating under today) is fiercely protective of its own turf and tries to prevent new entrants, and digging their heels in implementing EU railway competition regulations. So complying with the letter of the law, but does everything in its powers to not comply with the spirit.

Then again, given the UK experience of going all-in on the "vertical separation" and privatization path, perhaps one shouldn't blame them.

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presentation 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, to be honest, the results in Japan and China, where that isn’t the case, have turned out to be much better.

	▲	jabl 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The interesting thing is how the EU railway policy just keeps plowing ahead trying to impose the "vertical separation" approach in the EU, despite the disastrous results from the UK experience (and some EU countries to a somewhat lesser extent, so far the UK seems to be the only example of going all-in on that approach).