Just to be fastidious - Sea Containers lost the GNER franchise to National Express, who re-branded it NXEC, spent a lot of money on painting the trains silver and then realised they'd promised far too much to HMT so managed to walk away from the deal. Of course if they found they had been offering far too little and were raking it in, they wouldn't have been pro-active in handing that "extra" profit over...
I think they looked at also stripping NX of its Anglia franchise as some sort of penalty, but the way the train operating companies set up their franchises from a corporate point of view meant that legally there was little connection between the 2, despite the common naming and branding and parent company. I believe the whole NX company at the time was vastly over-leveraged and had spent too much of other people's money expanding too fast.
In principle if private companies can run a railway cheaper and more efficiently and offer a better service than a state monolith can, I don't think a lot of people would have a problem with that. However what we have ended up with is a lot of route monopolies run by 4 or 5 huge transport conglomerates (Stagecoach, First, Arriva, Go-ahead and a few foreign ones) who go chasing franchises every couple of years offering more for less and then fail to deliver. Unsatisfactory all round. As for the exercise in re-painting and re-vinyling the trains every few years (not to mention the station signage and the stripes on the lamp posts amongst other things!), one of the upsides of Transport Scotland getting involved in the running of the ScotRail franchise was to decide on a corporate identity for the whole network and to stick to it.
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