I believe I have made the following point elsewhere on the forum but it bears repeating: the national rail network in this country loses money when taken as a whole. That loss is made up by subsidy from public funds. Of course the detail of the financial balance varies greatly across the network but the basic fact still stands. It is also possible to argue that any increase in the "size" of this loss-making railway, whether in infrastructure or passenger-carrying capacity, runs the risk of making that loss worse. This leads to any proposal for such an increase being subject to a rather complex evaluation to test its value for money, often expressed as BCR (Business Case Return). Given that the Treasury is at best sceptical about the value of a national railway these evaluations tend to err on the side of caution. The outcome is what we experience currently, a network struggling to keep up with demand with promises always of "jam tomorrow" but tomorrow seems never to come!
As for a solution I doubt we'll ever see it as it requires political intervention on a fairly large scale. We, as an electorate, tend to prioritise other matters (and parties!) when we cast our vote so it seems inevitable that the making-do-and-mend attitude that dominates so many railway policies will continue.
It depends on how far you take the industry is "taking" money from the government.
At a HMRC pays moneyto DfT to pay to NR, TOCs, etc. and they pay it back, then the industry costs the country.
However if you then look at the amount of tax that the companies pay (including staff tax deductions) then I am lead to believe that it is broadly balanced.
However, even that doesn't take on board that the staff pay oils the economy (more taxes to HMRC) and that there would be less jobs if there were no railway (potentially more people claiming benefits, either directly or indirectly) then it could be argued that by running the railways is a good thing for the country.
However, one thing that could be a focus of an investigation by the government is looking at schemes and/or services that would increase the use of existing lines without costing much. Using what we have more efficiently.
As in simple terms a track that has 1 train every two hours doesn't cost 4 times that of one that has two trains an hour to maintain. Yes, there are cut offs depending on amount of capacity that a line has.
By running a new service over >95% exiting track then the amount of extra track access charges would be much higher but without much in the way of extra costs (other than the build costs of the new track).
There are other ways, for instance electrifying the line to Salisbury and extending the Basingstoke stoppers you double the frequency of services between Basingstoke and Salisbury without needing to do much other work. That will make it much more attractive to use the trains (i.e. more passengers) but with limited impact on costs (little or no extra track, limited extra rolling stock).
Even where no electrification is planned running extensions of services over otherwise quite lines. For instance splitting the Exeter service so that part goes to Weymouth means that it gets to Weymouth about 15 minutes slower from London than going direct which means that if the price was slightly cheaper going that way off peak it could attract enough passengers to make it worth doing that (see Portsmouth via Basingstoke services). It also has to be remembered that often the very fast services to Weymouth don't always call at fairly busy stations like Basingstoke and Woking, so it could make services between certain stations more frequent.
Do that enough times across the network and enough small improvements to numbers of passenger could mean that however you evaluate future government spend on railways it always came up as a positive thing.
Look at GB cycling, they focus on a lot of small improvements and it makes them the fastest. If there was a program of lots of small improvements to attract more people to the network, focused where there is already some space for extra services, then the cost of subsidy of the railway would fall.
Those small improvements could also mean that big projects (like HS2) could then be even more successful then they otherwise would be.
