IRKUTSK, May 4 (Itar-Tass) — The Russian Railways company (RZD) regards car casting of the CIS largest producer Kremenchug Steel Works potentially dangerous. Its defects was the cause of another crash that occurred on Trans-Siberian Railway (TransSib) in the Irkutsk region on Thursday, the press-service of the East-Siberian Railway, and RZD subsidiary, reported on Friday.
At 02:25, Moscow time, Thursday, a wagon with wood derailed on the Uk – Kuryat stretch, which blocked traffic on the railway for almost four hours - trains in both directions had to run on one track. According to the press service, the 600 metres of tracks were damaged in the incident.
The RZD commission has found out that wagon derailed due to a warped solebar that manufactured by Ukraine’s Kremenchug Steel Works in 2007. The wagon was used by the Spetsenergotrans JSC that rented it from the VEB-Leasing JSC. Since the beginning of the year, it is already the 16th case of fracture of a wagon’s solebar and the fifth case – of this manufacturer. At stations of technical maintenance of freight wagons RZD has identified over three months more than three thousand solebars with latent defects, 550 of the defects were in the Ukrainian casting.
“RZD informs about the possible risks of using the rolling stock with the potentially dangerous solebars,” the company said in a statement. The Russian monopoly recommends the owners of rolling stock “to limit the use of cars with the potentially dangerous solebars until the cause of their breakage are found out and removed.”
Earlier, the Russian Federation had already introduced temporary restrictions on the import of products of the Ukrainian railcar manufacturing companies Kremenchug Steel Works and AzovElectroStal because of their defects that caused accidents on Russian railways.