At the end of the nineteenth century, the German engineer Gustav Hartmann set up a locomotive factory in Luhansk. Gustav was the son of the successful locomotive builder Richard Hartmann of Chemnitz, Saxony. This new factory was well positioned to compete with other locomotive suppliers in the Russian Empire.

In 1918 the factory was renamed the October Revolution Locomotive Works and it subsequently turned out more than 12,000 steam locos for the Soviet Union. After the second world war it supplied diesel locos to the Eastern Bloc. In the 1970s a good customer of the works was the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR), the state railway of the German Democratic Republic. Under the centrally planned and cooperative economy of the socialist countries, East Germany was encouraged not to develop high powered diesel traction on its own initiative but to collaborate on a project covering the whole Eastern Bloc and centred on the October Revolution factory, and then to buy the resulting products. These included the DR's 120, 130, 131 and 132 series.

There was an irony here given the factory was founded by a German who came from the city which subsequently became Karl-Marx-Stadt. In technical respects, it meant a move from hydraulic to electrical transmission, putting more distance between the loco specifications of the two German railway administrations. Nonetheless it was a positive step as the products have generally proven robust and long-lived.

The factory suffered from looting after parts of the Luhansk region declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 and it has apparently shut down production.