Exactly--that's why my head hurts. The State is the people who believe that what's theirs is theirs, and what's mine is up for grabs. So will this "State" thing of yours protect me from itself? Sigh. I didn't think so.
(By the way, I read a fascinating piece today on the law of Bitur-Camember, which relates to this issue. It states that the amount of resources "up for grabs" is almost exactly equalled by the resources spent lobbying to get your hands on it.)
That's a fairly simple problem because a train can only be on one track at a time and there was only one person (centralized system) responsible for that segment of track... Railroads didn't overlap, air defenses do. It's just not the same problem.
The overall point, though, is that coordination isn't nearly as hard as you were suggesting. As for "overlapping", they overlapped wildly! A train making a long trip would carry goods for many railroad companies on the same train, using cars belonging to many railroad companies, over roads belonging to many railroad companies. The car might belong to a different company than its load, which was different from that of the road, which was different from that of the crew. The coordination issues are much snarlier than you appear to think. Many different models were tried for allocating the cost fairly between the owner of the cars, rails, crews and cargo, and for making sure that everyone eventually got their money, and their property, where it belonged.
I really don't think that 'protecting airports' was the real purpose of those troops. They were there to reassure people...
Exactly! I'm sure you're as disgusted as I am by that! The government spent millions, and wasted thousands of valuable military man-hours, for no purpose whatsoever except to score political points by making people believe the government was "protecting" them, when in fact it was weakening their protection in order to put on this show. Private defense contractors would go out of business doing idiotic things like that.
"The overall point, though, is that coordination isn't nearly as hard as you were suggesting."
I've had some Operations Research training and I understand the complexities of train scheduling. I've also done some air defense work. Theoretically, you can do the coordinating. It's far more complex than it appears. Trains simply move where they're told. They are not hostile entities like a penetrating bomber force.
"Exactly! I'm sure you're as disgusted as I am by that!"
But I'm not disgusted. It was necessary in order to get the system working again. It was not a matter of scoring political points, it was a matter of reassuring the public. While it may have been inefficient, it worked.
"Private defense contractors would go out of business doing idiotic things like that."
Private contractors would have done something quite similar with just as large an investment of time and energy. There simply had to be a 'major show'.