Andrei Karunos

R

ussian railroad men and makers of rails from the city of Novokuznetsk have been partners for seventy years. It is symbolic that even their “new birthday”, the establishments of the RZD JSC as a result of reforms at the Ministry of Railways and the NKMK JSC on the basis of the restructured integrated iron & steel plant, took place on the same day. That is October 1, 2003. The stable nature of these relations is considered to be the key condition of success in implementing new joint plans.
Managing director of NKMK Vyacheslav Pavlov stresses that the five-year contract lets make large investments with confidence. "We have got a clear-cut picture of RZD’s needs, both current and future", says Pavlov. NKMK makes the whole range of rails and rail braces under the Russian standards and it is going to further extend this range in compliance with customer’s wishes. In 2007 the reconstruction of the NKMK rail production facilities should be completed but some stages of this program have already been over and have started bringing results. Specialists note the high quality of the enterprise’s such products as rails for the low-temperature use, rails of the new generation for concurrent movement and rails of increased durability and contact endurance.
The rail quality has been significantly improved by the installation of steel complex processing. The second similar installation is being now constructed. In the words of NKMK’s chief engineer Yevgeny Pyataikin, this will make it possible to ensure needed quality characteristics of all steel produced at the plant. Among other innovations the plant’s leaders single out the system to intensify melting of electric steel with the help of oxygen as well as the system of rails’ nondestructive check. According to Vyacheslav Pavlov, all this brings rails of NKMK close to those of the best world samples.
In November the construction of the head part of the rail and structural steel shop will be completed. Costing about 30 million euros this project will be extremely important as a connecting link between the electric furnace steelmaking and rail production. (At present, there is a temporary scheme in the use at the plant, which allows to get rails of high operating characteristics, but requires excessive costs). Chief engineer Yevgeny Pyataikin particularly notes the work of the company’s partner Techint, which has managed to successfully implement the technology of heating rails for quenching. "Now we get sufficiently high tread precision without mechanical processing", Pyataikin states with satisfaction.
All samples of rail products from NKMK are traditionally subjected to operational tests at a special range, which is the experimental railroad circle in the town of Tshcherbinka near Moscow. Rails made on the basis of the latest developments have already endured over 1 billion ton-kilometers of operation practically without cases of being removed from exploitation. The chief engineer predicts that the final figure will grow to 1.3 billion ton-kilometers. It is worth recalling that just recently the upper limit for the Novokuznetsk rails amounted to between 500 and 600 ton-kilometers, while the Japanese-made rails reached 1 billion ton-kilometers.
The managing director of NKMK is not afraid that such a considerable increase in endurance will result in reduced orders: in his words, railroad men "also yield to requirements of progress" and they have to raise trains’ weight and speed movement. "In the future Russian railroad men are planning to make up trains weighing about 9,000 tons. Resources of the rails, which are in operation today, would be exhausted too soon, while the new rails will endure the usual service life", explains Pavlov.
NKMK has offered a pilot batch of rails for a tender to supply a future high-speed Moscow-Saint Petersburg railroad. Participants of this tender will also include such recognized world leaders as Japanese and French producers but, regardless of so strong a competition, NKMK has real chances for victory. As the plant’s leaders believe, along with the fact that their rails’ quality has already reached world standards, the price is an doubtless advantage of rails from Novokuznetsk.
Managers from the Novokuznetsk Iron and Steel Plant stress that RZD has been and will remain the chief customer of its products. They call today’s relations with RZD understandable and transparent. "Our relations meet requirements of the partner and, in our turn, we satisfy all their demands, including those of developing new types", says Yevgeny Pyataikin. Sometimes the plant’s capabilities even happen to be ahead of the customer’s requirements. For example, today NKMK is technically ready to put out 50m-long rails but it limits itself to making rails with the maximum length of 25 m. As RZD states, it will be able to start using long-length rails by 2010 only.
Although RZD is the chief consumer of the NKMK rail products, it is not the only one. The enterprise and the management company Evraz Group are actively participating in international tenders. Just recently, in particular, there has been a request for supplies of tram rails to Italy. In total, the annual supplies of rail products abroad reach 50,000 tons (as of 2004). Among permanent buyers of the Novokuznetsk rails are Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, the Baltic States, Korea. In December 2004 NKMK made, for the first time, rails of a higher durability and contact endurance designed for curved railroad sections. Considerable volumes of such rails are being bought by Mongolia.