IOW, the subsidy is in the form of taxes on fuel.
For state owned rail avoidance of tax on fuel or energy would simply be a pass through on the governmental budget if government also owned the fuel or the power plants or dams.
Last evening I was digging through some Baptist/Christian Church hymns and ran into some Russian church groups singing them. That always leads to Transiberian Express Music, then to the Transiberian Railroad.
Something I'd never noticed before is that the line from Moscow to Irkutsk, on the Moscow Peking line, is ELECTRIFIED! I opened up a number of different videos on that line and could not find any oil fired engines anywhere. Either the Russians have electrified the system or there are no videos of the non-electrified portions.
Socialist theories of ownership and utility of production probably get in the way of any rational understanding of what goes on with a publicly owned rail system, particularly if it's handling both profitable goods and unprofitable people.
Suffice it to say, at the end of WWII, railroads were being put back into shape quickly ~ streets and major thoroughfare roads weren't.
Folks thought transport and travel were sufficiently important to fix the rails.