POWER FAILURE IN EAST ANGLIA

Just had a further thought.  British Rail should apply for government funding to install say a GWatt of emergency generation plant which could be spread all over Britain and Natgrid could then shed the railways first; knowing that the railways have that emergency generation to keep them going.A few minutes delay is better than hours of disruption.
 Further, British Rail should always include a single hybrid diesel electric unit on each intercity train so that in case of an electrification line fault, the driver is able to continue slowly towards his destination. NOTE signalling and points are all assumed to be on a separate DC battery backup supply.

Trains where the on board computer does not need to be re-programmed if there is a power cut of more than 5 mins would also seem to be a good idea.
news article   I understand that the Siemens programmable controllers forget their settings. Which is so fundamental as to be almost unbelievable that no-one tested it, in a way our mains supply is too good.

Turns a 5 min delay into many hours, and may explain while some countries with less reliable infrastructure shun the latest technology.

One often hears about Switzerland and its marvellous railway system and how it runs so punctually, in spite of the many types of snow they have there. I wonder what contingencies that country has for dealing with power failure. Should we be talking to them?

I understand that the new trains currently running on Great Western are hybrid diesel electric, while electrification progresses towards the west. Should these trains stay that way?

Yes, hybrid diesel-electric engines give the operator much more flexibility and may in fact be cheaper to run than the all electric versions.  This would be particularly so,if the carriages need additional heating in the winter and they could avoid the addition expense of installing emergency power generators in case of grid power failures.
Not sure what the Swiss do to cover supply failures but it would certainly be interesting to find out.

Switzerland is fairly self sufficient for electricity at the moment with a mixture of Hydro and Nuclear (the Greens are trying to upset this but that's another story). The Swiss Railways have their own Hydro stations and grid running at 16 2/3 Hz with some converter stations to take additional power from the 50 Hz grid.
A significant quantity of electricity passes through Switzerland, Italy was blacked out a few years ago due to failure of some trans alpine interconnects in a storm but the lights stayed on here.

Best regards

Roger