Thread by @jonworth

Also I see a fight has broken out in the German media today about the separation of the network from operations in German rail

I can't get very worked up about this one

1) Building the infra to make Deutschlandtakt work is more important than this

2) At least other operators like Flixtrain exist in Germany - more than can be said for some other places. Do you need greater separation to facilitate this? Maybe a bit, but 🤷‍♂️

3) More important is addressing what to do if DB doesn't serve a big city with IC or ICEs - like Chemnitz for example - here there needs to be a way to give a contract to run those sorts of services that might be missing

4) What type of railway you get depends on how much you invest in the infra, and where - and given Germany has had a bunch of useless CSU transport ministers for the past 12 years, how much was that and how much was a structural issue? I don't know

5) Related: "Switzerland does it well and has it integrated!" type of arguments are also not really handy here - Switzerland subsidises its railway a lot more than Germany does, that is at least as much an argument for why its better than any non-separation point

6) Private operators might see opportunities - also in terms of international connections - that a monolithic state operator does not. Likewise cherry picking by private operators isn't handy either. It's complex.

/ends

7) Oh and "Britain separated it and it was a mess" arguments are equally spurious. Britain did it first, cocked it up, and half repaired it since. But yeah, who looks at UK and goes "oh, well governed there!"