It seems like a lot of people think it's poor that a lighting strike directly on equipment is handled so much better elsewhere than it is here. So I am going to ask, is this really true or just the usual "Typical Britain" comments that prevail whenever a weather related incident happens?
I don't know about anyone else, but I've been uncomfortably close to a lightning strike (less than 30 feet), and from what I saw huge surge of electricity hitting electrical circuits tends to play havoc with them. Perhaps, and it's just a suggestion people should wait to hear exactly what happened on the ground before going off on one?
I think, from a passenger point of view, it's quite well-understood that this specific incident is serious and fairly exceptional.
However, disruption in and of itself is not exceptional - indeed in this particular part of the country at the moment, 'normal' operations are somewhat exceptional.
The issue is how the industry copes with it, communicates with passengers and learns. As an example, the Transpennine Express website has, all afternoon, had the red disruption banner across the homepage. However, the link didn't go to the disruption page; the one that details what's happening and what ticket restrictions/acceptances have been varied. No; it went to the largely-useless live departures board page.
As of about an hour ago, heading into the evening peak, when the entire network is in turmoil, the banner has gone and there is absolutely nothing on the website homepage to alert travellers to what's going on. Nothing.
I don't think many people, here or elsewhere, are unaware of just how difficult this must be on the ground for those tasked with dealing with the problem. However, arrogantly dismissive responses to passengers' real need for assistance and guidance simply make the situation worse.
As a poster above alluded-to, concentrating certain functions in a limited number of locations, with apparently questionable resilience to either acts of god or, perhaps worse, malicious intent, may be efficient on the good days, but less so on the (regular) bad ones. That, coupled with the contemporaneous fragmentation of operations, would appear to be a challenging set of contributors to expect to achieve reliable and responsive performance from.