The trains in the UK seem ok in terms of the number of services and reliability, but they're so expensive. It's almost always cheaper to fly or rent a car than it is to use the train for anything approaching long distance.
Where are you planning on parking when you get there though?
I'd rather pay quadruple for a ticket to London, than drive into London and then try to park a car. I can't imagine driving into a city - seems insane.
I am originally from the outskirts of Glasgow and now live on the outskirts of London. For my partner and I to get to my parents house by train takes about the same time (assuming all 4 changes go according to plan), costs 6x as much and is far less flexible than driving. We tend to stop at a cheap hotel midway so we can set off after I finish work.
But often the reverse is true - if your meeting isn't in the middle of London, it's much easier to drive directly to the place than get there by changing trains. This applies even more if your destination is a smaller place.
Under the rail franchise agreement during the bid process, the terms might mandate that journeys from A to B cost £10, and that journeys from B to C cost £5. There might be no obligation to price travel from A to D via B & C at a particular cost, so a rail operator might make that more expensive.
It’s silly from the consumer perspective, but it makes sense for the rail operators to do this in order to maximise profits.
There's no negotiations between the companies here, though they could ask the regulator (the ORR) to intervene if they believed the algorithm gave unfair results.
In real terms the main reason is to protect commuters and capacity - as a theoretical made-up example during the bid process they might be aware that lots of people travel from Milton Keynes to London so the council wants to put a cap on increases for that route. They might also still have lots of capacity on the route from Banbury to Milton Keynes on a morning, so that is priced much lower than Banbury to London. So if you go Banbury -> Milton Keynes you might get a “discount” for not a lot of people using the line, and travelling from Milton Keynes -> London you get the rate that’s protected for commuters, but if you go between Banbury and London then part of the route is already at capacity and there is less discount on the rate.
The pricing, timetables and services were basically all centrally controlled. The train operators put in requests to change them, then the government (or Network Rail or whoever they delegated the power to) would approve/deny them. Since they're sharing access to the underlying infrastructure, they can't do what they want.
Additionally, there are many trains that are unprofitable but the operators are required by law to run them for public interest reasons. When they designed the franchising system, they tried to "balance" each franchise so it had roughly the same number of profitable and unprofitable routes.
The idea that our existing franchising system was anything remotely resembling free market is absurd. Then on top of that, because decision making and control was distributed amongst 40 or so different corporate entities, trying to make a change to the ticketing system was damn near impossible.
If anything, this new concession-like system will likely be more competitive, even if the government is acting as an intermediary.
As was the idea that this was even possible.
It was never set up to impose market discipline on the rail providers. It was set up to be a profitable investment. So Richard Branson could (as he put it), print money.
EDIT: Also I wouldn't call UK trains reliable. I see a lot of stations having a fleet of coaches ready or sometimes in use because the trains are out of service. That's very poor.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190912051032/https://www.stand...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210225224745/https://metro.co....
The ownership structure doesn't matter. The UK has lots of publicly-owned and privately-owned transport systems that work well. The problem has been management. This is unlikely to change that.
I live somewhere in the UK that already has publicly-owned rail. Not as bad as the South-East, but it is still bad. I have no real idea how...but they manage it. EDIT: it actually hasn't transitioned yet...so we will see.