All the new management hires will then want to put their own stamp on things which means doing things differently than before. So we've been going back and forth between different paradigms. Sometimes within months! We seem to be going back between role-based teams ("we have too many silo's, we need to join all technologies of a role in a team!!") to technology-based teams ("we have too little focus, we need to focus on all responsibilities for one technology per team!!"). Literally several times we've made this switch over the last years, back and forth.
It just feels like each new hire just has to change it just to be seen to be doing something by their bosses. No newly hired manager every wants to leave things the same even though they are working just fine.
The thing is that we are very versatile. We can deal with the drawbacks of each model. We collaborate even though we're not in the same team. We can't work properly with all this ongoing reorganisation though. It's like the chair is being pulled out from under us for no reason.
It's not that vertical integration is good everywhere. But neither is avoiding vertical integration. You have to use your brain and look at what's beneficial in a given market. And train operation strikes me as a place where vertical integration is essential to long term success and efficiency. If it was actually a free market, I'm sure that it'd converge to a few vertically integrated companies with monopolies in large geographic areas.
I'd also argue that government owned corporations have become better at operating efficiently. Business has almost become a science. You're not as reliant on brute force through competition.
And when government corporations are more expensive, it's usually just because they treat their employees better.