I said 100.000, but it could be 50.000 or 70.000, surely the 'official' assessment of those who had all interest to minimize and justify the fact can not be taken by granted.
Neither the German police at the time (in their secret official reports), nor modern historians like Reichert, nor the committe appointed by the Dresden council have any interest in minimising the death toll at Dresden.
The attack was deliberately aimed to produce a firestorm in the centre of the City, all tactical targets (railroad, barracks) were far outside that area, moreover military targets were not included in the bombing plan (like the railroad bridge)
Actually the central railway station was heavily damaged. Irving goes into some detail on it:
"The carnage at the central station was the worst that General
Hampe had ever seen. The building itself was a large, nineteenthcentury
structure, its platforms covered by a single glass-and-iron
arch extending the length of the station.
On the night of the attack there had been a train standing at
every platform of the ground-level Dresden terminus beneath this
arched roof; on either side of the terminus station, supported by
concrete piers, there were two high-level express tracks that conveyed
the through traffic between Czechoslovakia and Berlin"
<snip bit about refugees>
"'What we noticed when we escaped,' recalled one Panzergrenadier
office, 'were not so much dead bodies as people who had
apparently fallen asleep, slumped against the station walls.' He had had
to change trains at Dresden en route to Berlin, and had had the
foresight to leave the baggage tunnel in which he and his men were
sheltering as son as it started to fill with smoke. Of his eighty-six
men less than thirty survived the night to arrive in the Reich capital, yet
another illustration of the colossal weight of the attack; but also an
indication that at least at the central station the victims of the terrible
triple blow were not all the elderly civilians, women, and children that
post-war writers would have us believe."
"The police chief 's report stated that the central station was completely
knocked out, with the destruction of all its platforms, buildings,
signalling and tracking equipment; ten trains had been caught in
the station by the raid and completely burnt out. At the city's
Neustadt station a refugee train and a hospital train had burned out
completely, and another refugee train had been badly damaged. At the
nearby freight yard a munitions train had exploded, and railway
carriages, goods wagons, and thirty mail wagons had burned
out in the shunting yards at Dresden's minor Old Town station. The
postal buildings were also wrecked"
Whilst Irving makes much of the fact that "through traffic" was running again in 3 days (as if a 3 day disruption in supplies to the eastern front was nothing), the railway facilities in Dresden were badly damaged. It's one thing to have trains running through the hub, another to have the loading and shunting and passenger facilities working again.