A new kilometre-long railway bridge was opened in the city of Kamen-on-Ob, the Altai territory, on Friday, Itar-Tass reports.
The train traffic there went through an old single-track bridge before. The old construction built in the middle of last century considerably slowed the cargo flow from the Kemerovo Region.
The new bridge allows increasing the capacity of the central Siberian way from the station of Karasuk, the Novosibirsk Region, to the station of Atryshta, the Kemerovo Region, by 1.5-2 times, the region's Governor Aman Tuleyev told the meeting at the opening ceremony on Friday.
There will be no train delays to pass through the bridge, and it means that up to 6,000,000 tonnes of coal a year can be transported in addition to ensure work of such a large coalmine as Kedrovsky, he noted.
The new bridge will allow transporting increased volumes of coal from Kuzbass to the European part of Russia and for export and relieving part of the workload of the Trans-Siberian mainline, Tuleyev said.
The bridge, the cost of which is five billion roubles, is expected to serve for 100 years.