At least that’s they playbook they’re all using.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Rail
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southall_rail_crash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladbroke_Grove_rail_crash
Edit: To be 100% clear the badly maintained infrastructure was the responsibility of a for profit private company at the point where people died.
> The passenger train operating company had failed to inform Railtrack and the signaller that the automatic warning system (AWS), which warns drivers of adverse signals, had been turned off in the cab of the HST.
But Ladbroke Grove was Railtrack's fault entirely (within the first few years of its creation). Meanwhile it's been 20 years since National Rail was created, when do we get to blame current governments and National Rail for bad infrastructure?
Railtrack made a lot of money by selling off land, and other assets, under invested and generally underperformed
> Railtrack made a lot of money
"Made" implies creation, growth, increase.
This is the opposite of what happened.
The money wasn't made. It was /extracted/. They /extracted/ a lot of money.
Railtrack doesn't have that money. Their succeeding entity doesn't have that money. The government doesn't have that money. The taxpayer doesn't have that money. None of that money was invested such that any of these entities might benefit from it in any way. It was removed from the system into private wallets.
The private owners plundered and fled, and the remaining skeleton was socialised again so it might regrow a bit of flesh from public taxes for the next extraction cycle.
https://www.channel4.com/programmes/ben-elton-the-great-rail...
When we sell our public investments for a quick buck we complain when the real cost of the service gets priced in. The trouble is, we pay the same taxes still, they just no longer go to the service we privatised, so we feel it in the pocketbook individually.
Presumably those taxes are going elsewhere now, but I was very happy with them going to core public services.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/usps-louis-dejoy-post-offic...
Amtrak gets surprisingly small amount of money.
USPS delivers to remote addresses no one else’s will on route that will never make money.
I expect the maximum profit sweet spot actually includes a small amount of penalties. If you don't get any penalties at all, you are probably leaving money on the table re service cuts.
