" wrote:
Does the Royal Mail receive any subsidies or is it responsible for
its
own financial well-being and charged with making a profit?


The latter, and Royal Mail is currently making a healthy profit. The
profits go into a reserve account and are supposed to be used for
investment and/or to cover future losses, but the Treasury tends to
keep it and deny permission for investment. RM suffered serious
losses for some years as a result of investment plans being cancelled
by the Treasury. :-(


France's SNCF is state-owned, though I heard an official once say
that
they have not received any since the early 1980s. Of course, I have
no
way of knowing if that is true or not.


At one point in the early 1990s, SNCF vied for the title of the
world's most indebted company with EdF, the French electricity
company. The debt was about the equivalent of three times' Network
Rail's current debt. The debt was run up by borrowing money to build
the LGVs.

The French government moved the debt out of SNCF and into an
infrastructure company which has no means of ever paying it off.
Meanwhile, SNCF claimed that the TGVs were making a profit, which was
patently untrue.

The same was done with EdF, and France's claim that the country
enjoys cheap nuclear power while EdF makes profits is also patently
untrue because, in each case, the debt remains.

The French government's innate ability to borrow colossal sums of
money and conveniently forget about its debts is why France's credit
rating has been downgraded.