When Beeching wrote the report the stations, carriages, services, and rail were publicly owned and centralised under one public company: British Rail.
In the mid-90s the services, carriages, and the stations were sold off as 14-year franchises to the private firms (most of which are actually public rail companies from other countries such as Germany and France), but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand. Ownership and responsibility for the network is somewhat unclear in many cases. I think at this point there is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).
There was an awkward period in recent years in which one of the private companies abandoned a major line as unprofitable and it was temporarily nationalised - it ended up becoming the most popular and profitable line while under public management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_(train_operating_co...
In terms of operations, the carriages were sold off for a song as 3 theoretically competing rolling stock operating companies (ROSCOs), which the francisees are pretty much obliged to lease from. These remain a license to print money.
The stations were all sold as part of Railtrack, although with a few exceptions they are operated by the train operators.
The initial franchises were largely for 7 years - the 14 year model came later. There was also no involvement from other national operators at this time - North-east and GWR were management buy-outs, although they fairly quickly sold themselves on to bus companies, Bus companies took over most of the rest of the franchises as well, leaving the rest to Sea Containers, Virgin (working 50-50 with... a bus company), and Connex which was basically a French bin lorry company.
National Rail is effectively just the remains of the BR branding, and was passed alongside the Rail Settlement Plan (which is very broadly the ticketing operation) to the Association of Train Operating Companies.
The East Coast line was abandoned twice as being not-profitable within the constraints of making the required premium payments to the government. Nationalization was reasonably successful, and the nationalized company did make premium payments, but they were not as much as National Express would have had to pay to retain the franchise.
Sorry for a double-reply, but I missed this bit before…
> I think at this point there is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).
Regardless of whether they're willing to, the non-ministerial Competition and Markets Authority undertook a project to "looks at whether increasing competition in passenger rail services could lead to better value for money and improve service quality"[0]. Nobody is bound to the results, but it seems compatible with what the Conservative policy has been: keep the privately run operators, but have them compete on-track (i.e., both run services) compared with the current status of just having them compete off-track (i.e., bidding for the franchise).
> the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand
No, it wasn't. The rail itself was sold off as Railtrack.
Following on from the Hatfield crash, after which it spent £580 million on repairing similar track faults as which caused the Hatfield crash, and a few hundred million more on compensation, which led to the failure of the company and it entered "railway administration" (essentially a special form of administration created along with the privatisation of the railways to avoid the railway ceasing operating when in administration). Network Rail then bought Railtrack in 2002, bringing the railway infrastructure back into public hands. Railtrack was then subsequently liquidated.
> but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail
It's called "Network Rail", "National Rail" is the organisation that provides a joined up timetabling and ticketing system for all of the train operating companies (e.g. Virgin, GWR, ScotRail etc).
Network Rail operates and maintains the physical infrastructure upon which the trains run e.g. track, signalling, special trains (such as de-icers, permanent way test trains, leaves-on-the-line cleaning trains).
edit: prior to Network Rail there was RailTrack which went bust after the fallout from the Hatfield rail crash.
In the mid-90s the services, carriages, and the stations were sold off as 14-year franchises to the private firms (most of which are actually public rail companies from other countries such as Germany and France), but the rail itself kept in a weird thing called National Rail that has an odd public/private structure that I don't understand. Ownership and responsibility for the network is somewhat unclear in many cases. I think at this point there is a political consensus that its been a complete mess and a botched privatisation that either need to be redone or just be re-nationalised, though Conservatives try to not talk about it if they can (they implemented it).
There was an awkward period in recent years in which one of the private companies abandoned a major line as unprofitable and it was temporarily nationalised - it ended up becoming the most popular and profitable line while under public management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Coast_(train_operating_co...