https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/GB...
I'll let you draw your own conclusions
From this page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail
In summary, it's a meaningless piece of chartjunk [edit: in the context of nationalisation vs privatisation, at least.]
Dunno about satisfaction but clearly, when people were truly dissatisfied they stayed away and now the primary causes of satisfaction and reliability problems are simply that the network is so in demand it's at capacity all the time, especially London commuter routers. Some of that is driven by the huge increases in population via immigration in the last 20 years but some of it is just that privatized services are better, so people use them more.
Do these matter if ridership is falling?
If they're not a proximal cause, no. If they are, yes.
But if ridership is going up even whilst prices are offensively high, satisfaction is at an all-time low, and reliability is a joke, then you can't assert that ridership is going up because of privatisation, it's more despite privatisation because people have few other options (cf London where driving is slow because of congestion, buses are often stuck in the same congestion, cycling is still sketchy in some parts, high prices have forced people out of walking distance, etc.)
Certainly there were other problems: the nationalization was downstream of the socialization of the British economy between the end of ww2 and Thatcher, and as can be seen rail traffic (a general proxy for economic health) is in steady decline from then until it rebounds slightly in the 80s before taking off again once put in (mostly) private hands in the 90s.
The reason the graph seems to run a few years ahead of the changes is that actually privatizing and nationalizing something on the scale of a national railway takes a few years to implement between politicians floating the idea and the final handover of power, but the effect on people's motivations and incentives begins almost immediately.
Albeit with the minimum service levels always specified (and consequently paid for in the case of unprofitable services) by the government.
Because in other parts even of Great Britain, like Norther Ireland, it was always public and it shows the exact same pattern. And many other countries had the same effect too.
It just so happens British Rail happened right at the time when the basic understanding of governments in Britain and most the world were anti railway and pro building an absurd amount of highways.
Lots of the increase in early part of semi privatization period in Britain happened and were only possible because of investments done by British rail. It very likely that the same effect would have happened under British rail. In fact the whole system basically operated on many of the same principles set up by British rail for quite a while.
In reality the government in the 'private' period still determined what prices and schedules were. And the same prices and schedules could and would have been done by British rail.
Next up, in this private period, Network Rail, they private company responsible for infrastructure so mismanaged and the infrastructure was about to collapse (they managed this in less then 10 years), so it was emergency reacquired by the government who then had to do lots of delayed infrastructure maintenance at high cost.
Rail nationalization in Britain made no sense. Even the people that did it didn't really have a good plan or reason why they wanted do it other then privatizing things seemed popular with right wing parties. They basically threw together a haphazard plan with a bunch of consultants who had little knowlage of railways.
> I'll let you draw your own conclusions
Yes feel free, but don't do it based on a single highly misleading graph without understanding the context.
If anybody is actually interested in the British railway network and history, I would recommend the RailNatter podcast.
If you do choose to draw a conclusion from this, you’re doing nothing except reinforcing whatever bias you may already have.