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National rail can be (at least) perfectly decent, which it is in the Netherlands. Too bad the EU wants to have it be fucked up by ‘competition’: the European Commission just now sued the Dutch state for giving the consession for the main part of the railway network to the national rail company NS.
Competition is good, but railroads are a natural monopoly - there are very few points in the world that can justify more than one set of tracks between them. Airplanes can share an airport because if someone else blocks a runway everyone else can take a different one and thus there can be competition. However if train operator B blocks a track (possibly by running a slow train) everyone else can't get through.
I'm all for competition, but you have to own your own tracks.
In the Netherlands the actual railways are owned by a separate company that was split from NS after privatisation, ProRail.
Railway competition is bullshit anyway. Neoliberal ideology pretends people constantly make informed decisions about what products they wish to buy. This is bullshit anyway, but with the railways especially. If you want to take the train to a specific place and arrive at a specific time, you will pretty much always have one option anyway. There is no choice. All the so-called ‘competition’ will do, is split up a currently contiguous network, which will probably introduce needless transfers to different train companies, where you currently have one.
So-called ‘competition’ is a disaster for what should be a public service like the railways.
Dutch have good national trains but are also part of the reason for poor trains on European level. The Dutch have built next to nothing high speed tracks, NS also don't invest in night trains.
The netherlands are at max around 320km x 150km. They are also densly populated with major population centers there. You really do not need classical high speed rail like the TGV in that scenario
You do need that if you're for example traveling from Amsterdam to Berlin, Copenhagen, Gothenburg etc, the kind of travel this article and post are about. Amsterdam to Berlin takes 7,5 hours, at least, by train that's ridiculously slow for just 650 km. About 1/4 of that is in NL, runs through a part of NL which is not at all as densily populated as the Randstad is.
Which is why we need to nationalise rail at the EU level IMHO
Just please don’t take away my Deutschlandticket
Make it a Europe ticket.