What would railways be like today if privatisation had not occurred?

[yorksrob]

The line via Crumlin is maintained well and is still used for passenger diversions once or twice a year when the line out via Mossley West is closed. Whilst it may be quicker from Belfast, it lost the quicker connections from Newry, Portadown and Lurgan, and direct journeys from Lisburn. The line also passes within spitting distance of Belfast International, which could open up a whole realm of prospects for the line.
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However looking back at WatcherZero's post I believe they could have been inferring more towards the Republic - places like Docklands, M3 Parkway, Nenagh, and the WCR etc have all fallen relatively flat on their faces within the last five years, let alone decade. For the last decade also services have been chopped and changed constantly year after year to save costs and give an optimum servgice on as least trains as possible.

The initial post which cited railways in Ireland was, I believe, Gareth Marston's, and this referred specifically to Northern Ireland railways as an example of a nationalised railway in the UK which has experienced growth.

 

[Helvellyn]

I think one of the things that gets overlooked in a thread like this is that we are effectively 20 years on from when BR dismantled the sectors and created the shadow franchises. Yet the BR sectors themselves had ib effect only existed for 10 years! So we're trying to make guesses as to what BR would be like today based on the fact that sectorised, business led BR has not existed for twice as long as it did!

 

[yorksrob]

I think one of the things that gets overlooked in a thread like this is that we are effectively 20 years on from when BR dismantled the sectors and created the shadow franchises. Yet the BR sectors themselves had ib effect only existed for 10 years! So we're trying to make guesses as to what BR would be like today based on the fact that sectorised, business led BR has not existed for twice as long as it did!

Yeah that's true,but it has to be remembered that up until quite recently, stats were broken down by sector, which suggests to me that this was a sensible way for disentangling the various demands on the network.

 

[Carlisle]

I think if the railways hadn't been privatised there'd be a lot more DOO than present, and possibly even some GOO.

If your serious then there would have been almost zero chance of more GOO outside self contained urban metro systems (never part of BR) as it requires too much capital investment and BR was mostly pretty short of dosh if I recall correctly ,but may happen sometime in the future