We study the long time evolution of the solution to the Kortewegde Vries equation with initial data υ ( x ) \upsilon (x) which satisfy \[ lim x → − ∞ υ ( x ) = − 1 , lim x → + ∞ υ ( x ) = 0 \lim \limits _{x \to - \infty } \upsilon (x) = - 1,\qquad \lim \limits _{x \to + \infty } \upsilon (x) = 0 \] We show that as t → ∞ t \to \infty the step emits a wavetrain of solitons which asymptotically have twice the amplitude of the initial step. We derive a lower bound of the number of solitons separated at time t t for t t large.