Chiltern Railways were great, and were one of the few TOCs that genuinely competed for passengers against other railways, as Chiltern, Virgin (now Avanti) and London Midland (now West Midlands / London Northwestern) all operated competing services between London and Birmingham.

Back in the day, Chiltern had express peak-time services to Birmingham which were only marginally slower than Virgin's high speed trains. But Chiltern was much cheaper and would serve you a cooked breakfast and proper espresso coffee at your seat - in standard class!

The white paper extols their open data promise which will allow (for example) "Personalised travel offers, like free coffee when a service is delayed"

I don't get this kind of argument. Efficiency doesn't mean a good service. It means to minimise the costs in meeting your contractual requirements. It's not unusual for a company to be set up specifically to bid for a government contract since they're so lucrative and so hard for the government to respond to: a very profitable approach is to compete for a contract and then offer the shittiest service for which you are not subject to penalties. In some cases the senior management of reputable public transport service providers with decades of service provision have basically just upped and left the country before the contract is even through.

The free market certainly provides benefits, but there needs to be some meaningful recourse to removing your custom while the provider depends on it. Otherwise, it's simply not a free market at all, no matter the circumstances that surrounded the bidding process.