Just before the New Year, the Belarusian Railway began exercises in loading and unloading military equipment with SRMA ramps.
SRMA is a demountable metal ramp, a device for driving all types of equipment onto and off flatcars under their own power anywhere, including unequipped spots on line sections. A separate type of ramp bridges the gaps between adjacent flatcars, so vehicles can be placed along the entire length of the train.
❗️On the Vitebsk–Yezerishche section (Vitebsk Division of the Belarusian Railway), on management’s orders, an SRMA installation drill was held on December 29, 2022, with related work at Prudok station and at Losvida station, 29 km away (sites for the SRMA were prepared and training loading and unloading was carried out). SRMA elements made in 1954 were used.
📍Note that the following are located on the sidings of Prudok station:
• to the northwest, military unit 94017 (2631st Aviation Base for Storage of Missile Weapons and Ammunition);
• to the southeast, the base of the Vitebsk Track Maintenance Section (PCh-12 Vitebsk).
📍Losvida station has no sidings. About seven kilometres west of it lies a large military area, the training ground of the 103rd Separate Guards Airborne Brigade (the Losvido training ground). Since October 2022, it has been one of the sites of a camp of Russian troops from the Regional Grouping of Forces.
Taking part in the drill were the Military Communications Service (VOSO of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Belarus), track workers and bridge workers; a truck crane was also provided.
Similar SRMA drills are also held in other divisions of the Belarusian Railway, at key locations of Russian troops. They test whether the military and Belarusian Railway staff are ready to load and unload equipment at sites not intended for it.
ℹ️ Removal of SRMA from storage began in October 2022; until then they had been in storage and there was no reason to use them. For more than ten years before that, the Belarusian Railway had held no drills in installing equipment as specific as SRMA.
