What I see everywhere, not just in Britain, is the same old story over and over again: privatizing the profits, nationalizing the losses.
We want the "fight" to occur. Economies are complex systems and humans have extensively proven that they're not good at running those. Free markets are the most effective way to facilitate technological progress and economic growth which indeed benefits everyone - although not in equal amounts.
However, we have to be mindful that free markets contain the seed to their own destruction. On the upper end, there's monopolies, price fixing and other anti-competitive behavior that disables the price finding mechanism. On the lower end, there is poverty which prevents people from participating and discourages entrepreneurship.
Good regulation does just enough to keep the fighters in the arena.
When employed in the right place. It's very much not clear that train networks are that place, in fact I'd say it's quite clear in the UK that train networks are not that place.
But hey, they are very efficient at doing that.
Unregulated markets move away from market competition. They move towards monopolies, exclusivity contracts and similar items. Enforcing competition is the only effective method of benefiting society.