The Lugansk Locomotive Building Plant, founded in 1896 by the German industrialist Gustav Hartmann, became one of the most important steam-engine works in the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the works employed tens of thousands of people and supplied locomotives to railways from the Baltic to Central Asia.
Most of the site is closed industrial ground, but a museum at the factory gates kept a fleet of restored steam locomotives — FD, Em, and L class engines lined up on a stretch of preserved track. Whether they are still there is another question entirely.