[PBL] Do British trains run on grid electricity? 

[broadgage] Yes UK trains do use grid electricity and have done so for many years.

Interesting. Swiss rail is almost entirely electric and has been for a century. But they have their own power stations. Gideon supposed a very good reason for that, as shown by the following example. On 22 June 2005 they had a system-wide power outage. They had apparent instances of regenerative braking in Ticino, far more than there were actually trains on the track, as far as I remember, and it tripped the supply there, which started a trip cascade. Later in the year, Carsten Weber explained what happened at a Workshop I was running. Took him about 40 minutes. At the end, he said “and that took 8 seconds.”

[PBL] Do British trains run on grid electricity? 

[broadgage] Yes UK trains do use grid electricity and have done so for many years.

Interesting. Swiss rail is almost entirely electric and has been for a century. But they have their own power stations. Gideon supposed a very good reason for that, as shown by the following example. On 22 June 2005 they had a system-wide power outage. They had apparent instances of regenerative braking in Ticino, far more than there were actually trains on the track, as far as I remember, and it tripped the supply there, which started a trip cascade. Later in the year, Carsten Weber explained what happened at a Workshop I was running. Took him about 40 minutes. At the end, he said “and that took 8 seconds.”