A thing of something is something something something
Template(s) drawn by Joshua Moldover, via The Railroad Paint Shop
By the 1960s the PV&T’s venerable class B locomotives were starting to get a little long in the tooth, so the Portland shops pulled two idled B1s units (238,239) out of the storage yard and remanufactured them as road units with the latest technology (at least the latest technology that the engineering department thought would be reliable enough to replace the almost 50 year old technology that the class Bs were based on) and, partially for safety reasons, partially for looks, a pair of streamlined cabs that looked like the upper 7/8ths of F7 cabs.
And so, the class B4 (aka class E) high horsepower road locomotive; rated at 6100 continuous HP (~8000 5 minute rating, ~7050 hour rating) and with enough tractive effort to run a 40 car train over the Green Mountain subdivision at track speed (instead of mountain climbing speed on this 60 miles of mountain railroad with grades up to 2%)
Looking like the offspring from a unholy union between a Little Joe & an EF-1 doesn’t hurt, either.