At least the passengers would have had plenty of horse steaks and lescargos to eat in the buffet carThe answer is "yes" - our brothers over the Channel also suffer from OLE and points failures - having been caught up in some of them over the years , the reaction is often (from a passenger point of view) - often worse than in the UK. One incident I was involved in on Lyon to Paris ended up with a 3 hour delay and the arrival at Paris had a large posse of armed police to meet the train "pour proteger les Cheminots" (to look after the staff)
My main point was if a line gets tangled with a train at 200 plus mph, i would imagine the damage would be substantialy worse than that at Radlett?