The European Union is drawing up a $19.66 billion plan to overhaul its road, rail, and bridge networks to cut the time it would take to move tanks, troops, and military equipment across the continent in the event of war with Russia, said EU Transport Commissioner Apostolos Tzitzikostas in comments to the Financial Times on July 29.
The effort aims to reduce transit time from “weeks or months” to just “a matter of hours, maximum a matter of days,” Tzitzikostas said.
“We have old bridges that need to be upgraded. We have narrow bridges that need to be widened. And we have nonexistent bridges to be built,” Tzitzikostas warned, highlighting the current infrastructure’s inability to support heavy military machinery like tanks, which can weigh up to 70 tonnes—nearly double the load European roads and bridges are typically built for.
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highlighting the current infrastructure’s inability to support heavy military machinery like tanks, which can weigh up to 70 tonnes—nearly double the load European roads and bridges are typically built for.
That’s uhhh, not really really how the limits on roads and bridges work. It’s just how we simplify it, because you can put “Max 30 tons” on a streetsign, but you can’t put “Maximum road pressure graph over a given area, with horizontal forces and overall load between supporting points, excluding second order effects from multiple load points” on a streetsign.
You can very obviously move an 80 ton tank-transport over a bridge, because we can also move 3 seperate 30 ton trucks over a bridge. We can move 60 ton cranes over roads and bridges without even worrying about any special rules. We just can’t move an entire line of 60 ton cranes over a bridge at 90 km/h and then all slam on the brakes at the same time.
We’ve got very normal traffic rules for dealing with 100 ton transports, and even 150ton transports here in the Netherlands. And none of them involve “never go over a bridge” because that’s completely impossible. You just need to space the vehicles sufficiently. Yes, that will probably mean closing the road, but if we’re at war, that seems entirely possible.
In Western Germany you can regularly find round yellow signs on country roads. They indicate the maximum load for military vehicles and are a remnant of the Cold War
This is not about the NL, Western Europe has built its infra to carry Western tanks during the Cold War, this is about the East.
A western tank like a Leopard weighs twice of what a T72 does, because it prioritises crew survivability over that of the vehicle.
Soviet tanks are much smaller since they would rather have you not hit the tank at all, the tradeoff is that if you do, it cooks the crew.
