alt Hacker Newsone thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines
Exactly. Tokyu's model of building a train line from the city center to rural areas and then building suburban developments in the rural areas the line traverses doesn't work in already built-up areas. Hence, there are still publicly-owned lines in areas where that model doesn't work. A great example is the Yokohama Municipal Subway. It is publicly owned and serves areas that were generally already built before the subway line was built.