well, yeah - it was the conservatives that nationalized the electricity sector in ontario, too. i think we've all forgotten that the coalition between free market capitalism and social conservatism is a creation of nixon & reagan; before 1980 or so, self-identified conservatives tended to be skeptical of markets and market theory.
the economic theory that the populists promoted was not socialism, it was mercantilism. they didn't believe in common ownership of resources, or dividends to the people or production of goods & services at cost or anything like that. what they wanted was a system that was stable and reliant. they wanted predictability in the supply chain because it was better for profit - and they represented bourgeois interests, particularly small businesses.
they wanted the trains to run on time.
so, using the language of nationalization as though they were pushing some marxist ideology is really disingenuous. what they were doing was rejecting the classical liberal economic foundations that we consider orthodox today in favour of mercantilist ideas that were popularized by the tories in britain. these mercantilist ideas may have some surface similarities with socialism, but trying to present the populist movement as a socialist movement with socialist sympathies or socialist ideas is just wrong - it was classical conservatism, not marxism. and, it was bourgeois, not working class.