No, the reason for that is that the semi-privatised model failed abysmally, compounding historical lag.

Most of Europe pays less for a superior experience. Reasons: Europeans literally rebuilt their networks from scratch post-WWII, and used the chance to electrify and modernise most of them - whereas Britain, that was bombed much less, just kept using very old lines (most of them are STILL not electric, in 2018, which is absurd). That's investment failure #1, driven by short-sightedness.

Then you have the privatisation shenanigans from the 90s onward. This is investment failure #2: in order to reduce running costs and avoid having to deal with running trains, every few years taxpayers end up paying huge one-off sums that basically offset any potential savings. In the rest of Europe, despite attempts at privatisation, the old state-funded companies still dominate, achieving economies of scale and efficiencies that private competitors will never be able to match.

Sorry to blow your rose-tinted bubble about public European rail companies, but they suck sometimes. In France, the push in the last decades for high-speed rail (called TGV) has left wide stretchs of the netword underfunded, there's a lot of short and mid-distance railway that are in terrible shape. Also we had train stations, starting point of long-distance trains in Paris, that had outage (as in no train arriving/leaving) lasting days this summer. Also not all the network is electrified, and never will be.

So maybe it would be worse with one or more private companies, but public companies are no silver bullet and will fail sometime.

I'm Italian, I know very well where the state-funded model can (and will) fail. But it's way, way superior to the UK rip-off experience. The fact that the UK basically doesn't actually make trains anymore (the few factories left are foreign-owned and don't really produce much anyway), unlike any other major EU country, is another clear symptom of a broken system.

Ok. I have nearly no experience with UK railways, so I can't say how bad they are.

Where did you get your info about train production? I would be interested how the figures vary from country to country.

You can have a look on Wikipedia, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_locomotive_builders

But then there is some local knowledge to add, like the fact that pretty much all factories left are just tweakers for the internal market (narrow-gauging and so on), afaik the only one with significant production and occasional export is Bombardier in Derby - which got very close to shutting down around year 2000 and is basically run from Berlin anyway. Most European factories, despite some consolidation after the EU common market reached full gear, still pump out trains sold around the world - and then you have Japan and China that play on a different level.

Afaik the best trains in the UK are all bought from abroad at the moment. Things might change with the HS2 (high-speed) project that should be tendered out this year [1], but note how the main candidates are basically just reselling Japanese tech.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38684010

Yeah, I found similar information, but I was interested if you had more information, like where the trains are built, since a company can have its headquarter in one country and factories elsewhere.