chrisl

How do we know they didn't/haven't been trying? A truckload of legitimate Russian explosives may have just been a target of opportunity and they took advantage when they could. There may be someone Ukrainian guys sitting around watching the rail yards waiting for a chance to get a bomb onto a train, too.

Looks like it went down fast in the initial explosion - there's not a second burst of water from a later splash.

I suspect it's consistent with a big bridge segment getting blown straight down into the water.

So regardless of whose explosives it was and who triggered it, Russia has a problem even if the rail line is still usable. If they're going to use the bridge to send military supplies, which by definition kind of includes large quantities of HE, they need to unload and inspect in detail every single train car that goes across to avoid the same thing happening next week on the rail bridge. So that's about it for supplies to the southern front & Kherson. Fall and mud are coming. None of the routes for supplies are secure (land bridge or Kerch bridge). If the Kerch rail bridge isn't usable, supplies probably have to go by truck through the land bridge, which is going to be lots of fun in the mud.

The last frame where the bottom turns white indicates when the explosion happened. It looks like a rolling shutter CMOS sensor (pretty standard for surveillance cams) that reads out one line at a time to make each picture. The readout was ~4/5 of the way down the frame when the explosion happened - the truck and adjacent car were recorded, and then another ~20% of the lines, then the explosion happened and saturated the remaining ~20% of lines of that frame and all the lines of the next, except for wedges along the left side and top that look like they were in shadow from the light (presumably the camera housing or some kind of enclosure).

The truck is still the best candidate. The guardrails in the intact lane are bent out like the explosion came from the opposite road surface - it looks like the truck might have been just before the pier that the road is bent in half over (with segments down on both sides). The rails on the train side of the dropped portion are also bent towards the train. It also looks like there's a scorch circle with a clean spot centered on the truck - maybe the lower part of the truck shaded that from the scorch. Someone with more direct experience with explody things might comment better on that.

With a Bill of Lading that says it's 2 tons of Russian explosives intended for Russian forces? (edit: It might even be an actual Russian shipment of 2 tons of explosives.) And the remotely triggered part is too small to notice on the x-ray.

The train is a pretty short target in time - do Russian trains run as reliably as Swiss? It might be easier if it's not a suicide bomber to know which truck it's going to be in and follow it in a car with a remote (which could just be a call from a phone). A

So Russia hires inspectors trained by the TSA?

Sure does. Looks like it was in the middle of the one span that's farther from us in the pictures that have the tracks on the right, and the near span looks intact because it is, and just got pulled off the pier. In the side views the span the truck was on is probably the one that's going into the water more steeply because it got pushed down in the middle. So was the train dumb luck or somehow planned? And suicide bomb or planted?

Looking at the side view, the span that's dropped that's separated by an "intact" span may just had the far end pulled off it's pier as the two spans near the train went. It looks like it's still aligned straight and didn't get pushed sideways.

Dashcam video. (edit: probably fake?) The replies have key frames pulled out as stills

You might have to DIY from satellite pics - the resolution is good enough to pick out individual tire marks on fields. I do that kind of thing regularly for unmapped hiking trails that are visible on satellite pics.

Is there any reporting on the timing of the Kharkiv missile strikes relative to the time of the bridge going?

Anybody who can slip a bomb onto a rail car can slip a bomb into a truck or crate that's going onto a ferry or barge. Watch for an attack into the land bridge to take enough distance to at least keep any rail traffic along the land bridge under fire. (edit: or maybe it's already in range according to LLF's post above)

Swimming lessons

That looks like maybe some guardrail blown out by the train blast, but I'm sticking with the lateral displacement from the car going up. Given that there's a second segment in the water with a still in-place segment in between the downed ones, there were probably at least two explosions - maybe one initial charge back where the first segment is down, then after the train rolled a little farther the second one that displaced the segment that's nearest us.

If it were properly designed it also would have to take into account earthquakes moving the ground underneath in all axes with the road on top wanting to stay in place due to inertia and the longitudinal constraint. Looks like they probably didn't account for that...

I've been watching LAX crane together the guideway for the new people mover for the past couple years. They're doing lifts like that on the regular, but it's after more than a decade of engineering and planning (because California and probably being designed for a 9.0). But they're not doing them over water. I suspect those segments are lighter and more flexible than they should be so that they could slap together the whole bridge as fast as they did, and the flexibility contributed to them coming out of place.

Just you watch them try...

Here's a good one from the same guy showing the intact segments in the water (clipped out the tweet because @FancyCat beat me to it by seconds) Being Russian and having no regard for safety, they could crane those segments back onto the piers in a couple of days and be driving trucks across it by the middle of next week.

I think the technical term is "That bridge is completely f$$%ed"

This view is good. But I'm questioning my burning road theory - something on the road should be on fire if it's correct. But it just dropped. Alternate theory is that the road segments are just resting atop the piers with lateral constraints, but no longitudinal constraint (to allow for expansion) and no vertical constraint (because bridges are heavy and gravity pulling it onto the pier would hold it in place) and the exploding rail car caused enough displacement that the adjacent road segments came unconstrained laterally and moved enough to drop.

And does the local fire department have trains? And how are the spans supported - will having a few spans out make it easier for adjacent spans to drop? Firefighting boats might be the best option, but unless they have foam to mix in, all they're going to do is mix flaming fuel around. They could maybe cool down adjacent cars and the road to keep more tank cars from going up and the rail spans from weakening further.

I kind of wonder if it was more effective than planned. That it's a burning fuel train isn't a surprise - if they have an insider they could put a GPS triggered bomb on a fuel car far from the bridge, without necessarily even knowing approximately when it would get there, and set a train on fire on the tracks. I read an article a while back - I don't recall if it was linked here or I found it on search - that pointed out that the bridge is poorly constructed. I may have found the article because I was digging around and the bridge was built way too fast to believe that there was complete engineering done for the seabed mounts. Here's a link to the 2017 article I'd read before: Russia’s Crimea Bridge Could Collapse Anytime And a second article from 2018: Kerch Strait Bridge to "snap in one moment": Expert explains "point of no return" Looking at the pictures in the OSINT post it's hard to sort out how many places the road is collapsed. The first picture shows two steep "ramps" but the ones that show the rail bridge burning up close show a supported span that's ramping down to one of the landfalls and that's had several of the road spans collapse. edit: now I see it's the same road span, but the steep ramps are later in time after the spans have fully dropped. From the buckling of the steel on the rail span it looks like burning fuel might have blown out the side of the tank car onto the road span, and the heat from the fuel (and maybe burning asphalt surface?) weakened the road supports enough to drop. They look blackened in the Andrew Perpetua post.