OREANDA-NEWS. EVRAZ ZSMK has produced 4,500 tonnes of 25 and 12-meter R50-N rails which will be shipped to Cuba until the end of February under a contract with Empresa Proveedora General del Transporte (General Transport Procurement Company) (TRADEX). The rails will be used for modernisation of the existing access railroads in accordance with a programme by the government of Cuba.

EVRAZ signed contract with TRADEX in December 2014. In February 2015, the customer visited Novokuznetsk to inspect the production process at EVRAZ ZSMK and evaluate the quality of new rails.

"We are impressed by what we have seen at EVRAZ ZSMK, this is state-of-art equipment and high technology. In addition, your company has an extensive experience in rail production. We hope that our cooperation with EVRAZ has a high potential," said Ledisvan Morales, Deputy Director, Cuban railway infrastructure.

"We are happy to establish cooperation with the esteemed Cuban counterpart. Cuba has a high potential to develop railway communication network and its government has already set off on the road to upgrade the existing infrastructure,” added Ilya Shirokobrod, EVRAZ Vice President, Sales. “EVRAZ rails have already proven reliability in hot and humid climate. Considering that this lot is made on a cutting edge mill we believe that our partner will be completely satisfied with the quality of our rails."

EVRAZ rails have a wide geography. The company supplies annually up to 40 thousand tonnes of rails to extremely hot climatic areas: California and Nevada in the USA, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Uzbekistan is one of the company's key customers in the CIS. EVRAZ has recently extended the scope of cooperation with this country: earlier this year EVRAZ supplied about one thousand tonnes of rails to Tashkent metro.