My apartment in Richmond had a setup very similar to this: Wooden cabinet with asbestos sheets tacked inside it, knob-and-tube coming through to a set of edison-base fuses. The service was upgraded at one point and they disconnected the fuses, tied into the K&T with some Romex and ran it to the new fuse panel. So what was left was just a very large, old fashioned junction box.
The inexcusable thing here is that somebody has worked on this recently and yet couldn't do anything to improve it other than throwing in some panel guts.
-John
