Also about the UK, did you know that the amount of train travelers has risen dramatically since they privatized the raiways?
Have you been to the UK and taken a train? Everybody hates it. It's fucking expensive. And the trains rarely ever go, except on the few commute-heavy routes.
I tried to take the train for London to Bristol, and it was 4x cheaper to take the bus, and I didn't have to leave at 6.30 AM. Which I did if I took the train.
People who say that the train privatization in the UK was a mistake either don't know how bad their train service was when it was still government owned or they only look at the ticket price
People like you who complain like an idiot about the NMBS clearly didn't take the train in the UK right now. The NMBS has its flaws, but at least it's affordable, and the trains are at least clean and comfortable as in the UK. The average delays are difficult, if not impossible to compare, since the NMBS and UK have different measures, but 64% of the trains in the Uk are on time within the minute, while 90+% of the Belgian trains are less than 6 minutes delayed. As I said, hard to compare (within 1 minute vs within 6 minutes), but it doesn't look like the NMBS is severely terrible compared to the UK.
Also, the UK tracks were privitized, but the UK government is magically still paying about as much as they did when it was nationalized. So, what exactly is the advantage of the privitisation, if ticket prices went up, and tax payers their contributions stayed the same? Seems to me like all they needed was a change of management, not a full fledged privitization, otherwise they wouldn't need those 4 billion pounds.
Somehow I'm thinking you are like my uncle: always complaining about the NMBS, wanting it to be privatized, yet he never actually takes the train. He also raves about how great Tatcher did against the UK railways, yet he never actually lived there, talked to people that actually face the current railway prices (they ar fucking insane), nor did he ever take the train there.
I lived in Belgium, the UK, and now the Netherlands, all the while taking public transport. From my experience, local transport (bus, tube) was the best in the UK while trains sucked. It has a horrible value/price ratio. The Netherlands have the best train system, hands down, but it's expensive. Belgium is like a cheaper version of the netherlands: cheaper, but more delays. Local transport in Belgium (De Lijn) is terrible.