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

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.

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.

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.

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”.