Or, more commonly, they have:

1. The public pay for and build the lines and prove market demand.

2. Decades later some 'fiscal conservatives' get elected.

3. Who then privatize them for a sweetheart deal to their friends.

4. Who then proceed to squeeze every penny they have out of the public, while foregoing expansion and service quality.

With an end result of everyone getting to pay through the nose for shit service, while profits accrue up. And nobody's building any competing lines, because rail is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, and it's hard to compete on capex with someone who got a full rail network by buying it, fully built out[1].

Nobody with a lick of sense will ever lend you the 100 billion dollars you need to open a from-scratch competitor, if you ever want to eat into the incumbent's margins. The incumbent knows this.

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The rail company is the poster child for either a crown corporation, or at most, a 'customer-facing services outsourced on a fixed-term-contract'.

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[1] Bonus points for rules around eminent domain changing at some point in the past century and a half, making it actually impossible to build a competing line today.

This is wrong! People keep pointing to JR and think that's the entire country and train system. It is not and never was. The majority of train lines in Japan were private, started private, privately funded, and are still private.

This take is hilariously misinformed. Japan's long-distance network was almost entirely public until JNR was privatized in 1987, and its successors the JRs continue to be for all intents and purposes controlled by the government.

Some not-very-light reading about the rise and fall of JNR:

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye...

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-death-and-privatization-...

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-death-and-privatization-...

This is entirely wrong. Jees this is so infuriating to see repeated. Japan has ~100 train companies. JR is 1 of those (now 7). The rest are not. Hanshin, Hankyu, Keio, Keikyu, Tokyu, Toei, etc all giant train companies, all private, have been since they were foudned.

No, it's not. The successful private companies all serve suburban commuters. The long-distance network was almost entirely JNR.

As of 1996, JR group still controls over 20,000 km of Japan's 30,000 km of rail, and that's after privatizing and closing a large slab of it (mostly those duplicated by Shinkansen).

The long distance is mostly irrelevant, People use trains daily for short commutes. As for JR, the arguably only reason it was in the position it was in was because the government got in the way. If they'd stayed out of the way the private companies would have built the rest.

Further, JR started private. It was nationalized in 1906. The Tokaido Line and tha Sanyo Line already built by private companies. They forced out 17 other companies and then ran it into the ground.

The only place private "might" not have built is rural and JR built those mostly as "pork-barrel" (favors to politians) when it was run by the government. I also say "might" because it is/was common, not just in Japan, to build housing and trains to that housing. You pick a place like Enoshima, build a few 1000s homes, build a train out there to sell the homes. So "rural" places do get private trains.