The damage to the rail-bridge must be quite limited, since Russia’s transport ministry reports trains will be running again at 8pm local time tonight [1].
Maybe, maybe not, but it's been the standard operating procedure of Russian government to - in reaction to setbacks during this war - produce a gradient of progressively worse news instead of giving out the whole truth at once.
With fuel fires burning that long on the rail bridge, the steel is useless now. I haven't seen any images of RU fire-fighting on the bridge to put anything out. They'll need to replace the tracks at the very least. Likely they'll need to replace all of those sections of rail bridge. That would take ~2 weeks to a month in the US in peace time. As RU doesn't have span launchers, it's going to take them months to repair, if they even can get the pre-made spans to do so, what with sanctions. That bridge is kaput for at least 3 months, if not the whole war.
Even if they can run trains over it, they're not going to be able to run full loads safely. The fire will have weakened the steel, removing some of the margin of the bridge strength.
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The damage to the rail-bridge must be quite limited, since Russia’s transport ministry reports trains will be running again at 8pm local time tonight [1].
[1] https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/railway-traffic-over-c...
Maybe, maybe not, but it's been the standard operating procedure of Russian government to - in reaction to setbacks during this war - produce a gradient of progressively worse news instead of giving out the whole truth at once.
With fuel fires burning that long on the rail bridge, the steel is useless now. I haven't seen any images of RU fire-fighting on the bridge to put anything out. They'll need to replace the tracks at the very least. Likely they'll need to replace all of those sections of rail bridge. That would take ~2 weeks to a month in the US in peace time. As RU doesn't have span launchers, it's going to take them months to repair, if they even can get the pre-made spans to do so, what with sanctions. That bridge is kaput for at least 3 months, if not the whole war.
If that's what the Russians are saying, it must be completely destroyed and unrepairable.
Even if they can run trains over it, they're not going to be able to run full loads safely. The fire will have weakened the steel, removing some of the margin of the bridge strength.