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Temirtau - the city of steel

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My first trip was a short one—just over 200 kilometers from Astana to the industrial and coal mining city of Karaganda, about 3 ½ hours by diesel train. Buses are faster, but the locals prefer train travel in the winter months because the road is often closed by snow or ice. It's a bleak landscape of coal tipples and abandoned factories, but the region is still the country's industrial heartland. The renovated Soviet-era steel plant at Temirtau (“Iron Mountain” in Kazakh), now owned by an Indian company, employs over 30,000 people making it the region's largest employer—and largest polluter...

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