To be “fair”, with how material exhaustion works, it could have totally been fine, as the bridge only would have bent and creaked beneath the guy, and then the next, under-weight-limit car would have fallen in.
Yeah you can destructively overload a structure a number of times before catastrophic failure unless you go way over. It may be internal stress but it can be as far as shearing a bolt or two. But each time you lower the load bearing capacity of the structure, and once that’s begun the structure is on borrowed time and you won’t notice until it’s too late unless you have regular inspections
To be “fair”, with how material exhaustion works, it could have totally been fine, as the bridge only would have bent and creaked beneath the guy, and then the next, under-weight-limit car would have fallen in.
Yeah you can destructively overload a structure a number of times before catastrophic failure unless you go way over. It may be internal stress but it can be as far as shearing a bolt or two. But each time you lower the load bearing capacity of the structure, and once that’s begun the structure is on borrowed time and you won’t notice until it’s too late unless you have regular inspections