Reliability of onboard power supply systems on rolling stock is a very important issue for the railway operator. While a failure of the HVAC supply results in a loss of comfort for the passengers, a failure of the supply for air compressors or for the traction cooling systems results in towing the train. This is, looking at the required availability of a train, not acceptable. An active redundancy concept for the onboard power supply maximizes the availability of the system. This paper describes such a system under the aspect of $cdot$ Weight reduction $cdot$ Continuous operation when changing from normal to redundant operation $cdot$ Flexibility in train design.