Hi Steven, hope all is well in your world. I kind of remember it stopping in the UP but did not know why or where. But thought I kind of recalled that. No idea on the repairs made other than the frame work for the movie Gaily Gaily? And that might be skewed as well as I was not there or involved in any way. I do know she went in the shop for work before going to the filming.

I do recall a lot of people were afraid of the "steam dome" work and thought Carl was always credited for not being afraid of the repair needed? So much boiler work back in the 1970s was akin to voodoo and most of us didn't really know what could or couldn't be repaired. "Condemned boiler" was a term used and think we often thought of that as the last word, end of story. I never got to know Carl and only knew him in passing so I did not get to pick his brain about the history of the #2.

After helping Skip with all we found wrong with the #2 back in the 2000s rebuild it is hard to fathom just how worn out she really was. Looking back it was great to see the extent of the repairs made to both the boiler and the running gear. A lot of old sin was taken care of. Some of the ugliness in the barrel might of been ok for a while but Gary's meticulous standards would not allow it to go unchecked. Thinking about some of the large areas of pitting on the 3rd course, throat sheet and rivet seams come to mind. So when the history unfolds you get an idea that some of the problems were on going and the running repairs were not truly going to fix the underlying problems. Am thinking about that front furnace bearer being broken on one end and the boiler settling onto it in a twist. The stress from that alone could easily cause the constant nagging wear to the running gear. You couldn't see that until the boiler was removed from the frame. That was a fun project being it was not mine and I did not have to pay for it or endure the BS from some individuals. Good to hear from you Steven. Regards, John.