The solitary class C was a prototype that was ordered for pulling trains on the Boston to Portland section of a (NYNH&H/PV&T) NYC-Portland train, but which was delivered juuuust before the US economy fell off a cliff in 1929.

It was fine for a passenger engine; nice and fast (it’s approximately 140 miles from Boston to Portland on the PV&T’s route through Concord, but the train was scheduled for 75mph end-to-end operations (three round trips/day), comfortable for the crews, and not overly hard on the track (the CMStP&P’s EP-3’s were a good example and B-W didn’t make the same mistakes this time around) but the great depression whittled back passenger counts enough so this solitary machine could handle all trains by itself (a class B + heater car was pressed into service whenever 242 was in the shop) and by the time ww2 happened the operations department decided to order more class Bs instead of going back to Baldwin for another go.

242 was doomed when passenger traffic evaporated post-ww2; it was taken out of freight service after a collision in 1951, then sat forlornly in the deadline at Portland until the 1961 merger, when it joined the TdM’s steam fleet’s march to the breaker’s yard.