The economic crisis also made obtaining diesel fuel extremely difficult, so the Korean State Railways decided to convert a number of diesel locomotives to electric operation, as intensive efforts have been made to restore as much generation of electricity as possible, with fair success over the past years.

[1] As a result, in 1998 the Kim Chong-t'ae works began a program to convert the more decrepit M62-type diesels in the KSR's inventory to electric operation.

[2] This was achieved by removing the diesel engine, fuel tanks and other unneeded equipment, and the installation of the necessary transformers and related gear to convert the power collected from the overhead lines, via newly-installed pantographs, to the traction motors.

The resulting unit is considerably lighter than the diesel version, and sound like oversized streetcars.

[9] Unlike those, which were rebuilt from original Soviet-built M62s, the bodies of these have all the distinctive features of the Kŭmsong-class, domestically built copies of the M62.