> Should regenerative braking be disabled in aboveground trains when heat impacts reach uncomfortable levels in belowground tunnels?
It’s not that simple. You can’t just treat the entire line as some kind of perfect conductor that allows to you move unlimited amounts of energy around. In reality there’s issues with both the conductive capabilities of the lines themselves, but there’s also the simple problem that train lines aren’t generally electrically connected end-to-end for a few reasons.
1. You don’t want trains pulling power down more of the line than necessary, when it’s more efficient to draw power from other parts of the high voltage grid.
2. You don’t want a single track fault to cause your entire line to be forced to disconnect completely.
3. You don’t want your line to accidentally become a power carrier for electrical grid, just because the two ends of your line a physically located far enough apart that they experience different grid conditions.
As a result most train lines are broken up into electrically isolated segments, each with its own distinct power supply. So you could turn of regen on overground trains, but unless they happen to be sharing a section of track with underground trains, it doesn’t create any additional capacity to dump breaking energy into.