The British Rail system is so ridiculously over-complicated, my only conclusion is that it is deliberately designed to add as many layers of profit and obfuscation as possible.

For instance, Southern Railway is owned by Govia Thameslink Railway, which is part of Govia which also operates Gatwick Express, Great Northern and Thameslink services.

However, Govia is a partnership between the Go-Ahead Group and Keolis.

Keolis is a French transportation company owned by SNCF, the French national railway, and CDPQ (a crown company of Canada).

Go-Ahead is owned by Globalvia, a Spanish multinational transport infrastructure company, and Kinetic Group (formerly known as AATS Group) which is an Australian-based multinational bus company.

Globalvia are owned by OPTrust, one of Canada's largest pension funds; PFZW, the second-largest pension fund in the Netherlands; and USS, a large UK Pension scheme.

Kinetic Group are also owned by OPTrust, but also by Foresight Group Holdings plc a British private equity and venture capital business, supposedly focused on clean energy generation and associated infrastructure (*cough* Go-Ahead spends £100 million a year on Diesel *cough*).

Now, try to imagine how many small subsidiaries those companies have where transfer-pricing can occur and how many layers of profit are being extracted.

France's SNCF trains are run by SNCF (owned by the French Government) who also do all the track and maintenance.

Germany's Deutsche Bahn (owned by the German Government) runs Germany's trains.

Deutsche Bahn also own Arriva and were nearly banned by the UK government for how badly they ran the trains in the north of England (spoiler: they weren't).

Avanti West Coast are part owned by Trenitalia, who are mostly owned by the Italian Government. Trenitalia also owns c2c who run the London, Tilbury and Southend franchise.

The northern railways were run by a succession of similarly named companies before being returned to the UK Government as operator of fast resort.

The whole thing is a tangled mess of the worst kind of vampire capitalism: sucking up subsidies, bleeding companies dry by overloading them with debt, providing terrible service, then handing the drained husk back to the government once they've bled them to death.

I've concluded that the private companies that replaced the UK publicly owned companies are run to be a front for borrowing money and sucking up subsidies to pay to shareholders. The train companies are no better than the water companies, though they seem to be better at obfuscating what they are doing.

It's the same formula over and over again: you borrow; pay as much of it as you can out to shareholders; run a minimal service to bring in just enough money to pay the debt payments; invest the minimum to allow you to keep operating and if possible, you do it through transfer pricing with other companies in the parent companies' structure. When your creditors eventually catch up with you, you go cap in hand to the government looking for a bailout and if that fails, you hand the franchise back before forming a new company to bid again.

Southern Water, for instance, uses 1/3 each bill to pay debt payments. Even Network Rail, who are owned by the British Government, are paying 1/3 of their income to service their debts.

This is very similar to the "hollowed-out firms" of the UK who distribute more to shareholders than they generate in net income—1/5 of FTSE 350 paid out on average 178% of their net earnings after tax in 2010-1019.

It's all a con and we are chumps.

Further reading

This unfathomable financial overview of the rail system in England:

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/A-financia...

This summary of who owns the British Railways:

https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways

This article about water profits:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/...

Hollowed-out firms:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-02/Tran...