Good thing we privatized it all
Ah, okay, so this route does not belong to Banedanmark, but to Hovedstadens Lokalbaner.
However, the web site of HL says:
Inden fusionen havde Hovedstadens Udviklingsråd overtaget statens aktier i privatbanerne, således at Hovedstadens Udviklingsråd ejer ca. 45% af aktierne i det nye selskab. Den øvrige aktiekapital ejes af amter og kommuner, som tidligere var aktionærer i de private baner.
^^ This means that all of HL belongs to government and municipalities. It also says that originally the routes had been largely privatized, but they were deprivatized in 2002.
Which you didn’t do, though: https://uk.bane.dk/en/About-Banedanmark
The very first sentence there tells it’s a governmental body under the Ministry of Transport. Unless Denmark has privatized its Ministry of Transport, it’s not privatized.
As you figured out yourself, this particular rail is privately owned, but also BaneDanmark is complicated. It is not a nationalized company in the sense that it is free of privatization and market shenanigans. It’s just a company that gets its funding from the state, and even that is oversimplifying it.
The private owners of the line in question are the government of Denmark and the smaller towns around the city of Copenhagen.
Yeah, I hate it as well how the Finnish railways is organized. By it being a “Ltd.” type of organization, it manages to incorporate the worst sides of both private ownership and public ownership in one. Almost any solution would be better than ours.
But it’s still not private. Words have meanings and if we misuse them, we lose our ability to protect ourselves for example from actual privatization.
The fact that a cornfield meet hasn’t resulted in any fatalities (so far) is at least good news.
