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How a 90-second power outage sparked chaos for train commuters

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Three side by side photos from left a woman's legs wearing a skirt and flip flops, a man's legs wearing shorts and a woman wearing a white strappy top

The power failure which hit a Network Rail operations centre in Manchester was a rare incident.

But after commuters were left facing chaos, it has raised questions about how a short outage at one operating centre could have a widespread impact.

Network Rail will face scrutiny for how its systems coped and responded to the outage.

That’s the publicly-owned body whose job it is to operate and maintain Britain’s railway infrastructure. That means the tracks, signals, embankments and major stations.

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It was at Network Rail’s operating centre in Manchester that the problem started. Its operating centres are where crucial controls are housed that let trains run safely across the country, with Manchester’s centre responsible for large parts of the North West.

It was hit by a power cut in the area, which was resolved within 90 seconds. And despite having a backup supply, given the centre’s importance, this failed to kick in as quickly as expected.

Chris Wright, north-west route director at Network Rail, said the organisation was “working really hard” to understand exactly what went wrong.

“We didn’t experience a 90-second interruption,” he told the BBC, insisting its systems were back online sooner.

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But he said some of Network Rail’s communications systems “did not respond how we would have expected, and then needed reconfiguring and replacing”.

“We’ve got to work really hard very quickly now to understand why that’s the case,” he added.

But because signalling was affected – think of that essentially as the traffic lights of the railway – trains had to stop.

Systems had to be rebooted. But there was some damage to the systems controlling signalling, and that took time to fix because of the need to replace certain parts.

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Thinking about how busy parts of the rail network are, and how many trains and crews were left out of position across the North West of England and beyond, helps explain why the impact was so big.

Network Rail has apologised to customers and opened an investigation.

Bosses say engineers have been working hard to “build additional resilience into our signalling systems to ensure that this doesn’t happen again”.

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Tenaz Energy Corp. (TNZ:CA) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Prepared Remarks Transcript

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OneWater Marine Inc. (ONEW) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Anthony Marino
President, CEO & Non-Independent Director

Hello. I’m Tony Marino, President and CEO of Tenaz. Thank you for joining our Q2 ’26 update. At the outset, I’d like you to note our advisories that we have at the beginning and the end of this presentation.

Let’s start with our operating and financial results. Production was up again in Q2, 6% higher than in Q1, reaching over 17,000 boe/d. And I will point out that our preliminary production that we have for July is approximately 23,000 boe/d. So continued organic growth in Tenaz as a result of the development activities that we and our operating partners are conducting on our assets, primarily in Netherlands.

Funds flow from operations, $74 million. That’s a 15% increase from Q1 on higher pricing and higher production. The better pricing, in particular, is reflected in our operating netback, which has reached over CAD 69 per BOE. That’s a 20% increase from Q1 ’26 operating netback. CapEx was significantly lower than in Q1. The total for the half year period is about $150 million. We had a heavier investment program in Q1 for a couple of different reasons.

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First of all, we had our Canadian program going, which is now completed. Secondly, we had more non-op activity in the non-GEMS assets in Netherlands. And another factor was that we were running our original Seafox barge doing some light workovers at the beginning of the year, and we didn’t have that going in Q2.

I would point out, and I think we mentioned it later in this presentation, but I’ll point out that we are bringing in the Triton-10 barge to do heavier workovers

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Vanquis Banking Group plc (FPLPF) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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OneWater Marine Inc. (ONEW) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vanquis Banking Group plc Half Year Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll.

And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Ian McLaughlin. Good afternoon to you, sir.

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Ian Michael McLaughlin
CEO & Executive Director

Good Afternoon, Alex, and welcome, everybody. If we just go to our sort of intro slides, Look, I really appreciate you joining this afternoon. It’s a bit of a frustrating update from Vanquis. I’m sure it is for you, if you’re investors it certainly is for us as a management team. We are making really strong underlying progress. I’ll go through a little bit of that in a second because I think it’s important to talk about how we’re doing with what we committed to do.

But then probably the meat of today’s presentation is what has happened towards the end of the first half that has caused us to change our guidance, so I’ll take you through that. I’ll then hand over to Dave Watts, our CFO. You can see on the screen, I’ve got James Cranstoun, our Head of Investor Relations with me and Dave as well. And then we’ll go to your questions, which are always a bit where we get great value from, so look forward to that. Please do post your questions as we go.

So look, as I said, a bit of a frustrating first half for us, really good underlying progress, particularly on transformation, but two headwinds and one particular tailwind, and that’s what I want to unpack. So if we just

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Prio S.A. (PTRRY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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