Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment his Department has made of the (a) resilience of power supply arrangements to railway signalling centres and (b) provision of back-up power supplies in the event of National Grid failures.

Network Rail, as the infrastructure provider, is best placed to assess power supply resilience.

Network Rail’s signalling power supplies are treated by the National grid as a priority. As such the standard provision for signalling centres on most parts of the network including railway operating centres are classified as part of an essential services distribution board. These are backed up by a fixed diesel generator and an uninterruptible power supply.