OREANDA-NEWS. December 02, 2009. A journey of environmental protection experts across Russia’s railway is continuing as part of the international Train to Copenhagen project organized by the International Union of Railways (UIC), Russian Railways (RZD), with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the WWF, reported the press-centre of RZD.

On 28-29 November in Yekaterinburg (on the Sverdlovskaya line), the international group of environmentalists visited the carriage and wheel workshops of the carriage repair depot at the Sverdlovsk sorting station, and were shown the wastewater circulation system, as well as the automated carriage-cleaning complex (VMK Sverdlovsk) with its own wastewater treatment facilities. Project participants were impressed by the level of organization of exterior cleaning work on passenger carriages and the stage-by-stage cleaning of the re-circulated water supply of each part of the complex.

On 29 November a conference dedicated to organizing environmental protection activities on the route was held at the Railway Workers’ Cultural Centre, involving the head of the Sverdlovsk Railway’s environmental protection department, Eduard Ryabukhin, the director of the Urals Centre for Energy Saving and Ecology and professor of the Energy Saving Faculty of the Urals State Technical University, Valery Anufriyev, and project delegates.

Eduard Ryabukhin discussed the range of measures being taken by the Sverdlovsk Railway to reduce its negative impact on the environment, and said that in 2010, waste treatment facilities in the stormwater drainage system of the locomotive depot will begin operations, with throughput capacity of 2400 cubic metres per day.

The Sverdlovsk Railway, a subsidiary of RZD, has received more than 8 million rubles under the investment project "Ensuring Environmental Security" in 2009. Over the past nine months, due to higher requirements for environmental protection, the railway has spent 3.5 million rubles on building waste treatment facilities at the Noyabrsk station. Equipment for gathering spillages of oil and petrochemicals were bought for 3.3 million rubles for the heat and water supply department. In addition, 783,000 rubles were spent on equipping a repair train with assemblies for hermetic magnetic sealing, and 599,400 rubles on modernizing the railway’s environmental control laboratory. More than 25,000 rubles have been spent on natural protection measures, such as cleaning land, removing and treating waste, monitoring pollution of groundwater on the territory of the Sverdlovsk sorting station, and the drawing up and coordination of regulatory documents.

Valery Anufriyev also delivered a report on work carried out under joint projects with the Sverdlovsk Railway ("Recycling of processed wooden sleepers").

During the final meeting, International Union of Railways official Margrethe Sagevik included a message from environmental officials of the Sverdlovsk Railway in support of the Train from Kyoto to Copenhagen campaign in the "climate" message that participants in the project are taking to the UN conference (to be held in December 2009).

Participants’ impressions from the journey can be read on the site http://www.traintocopenhagen.org