Someone make a new pilot out of those used tubes.

[quote="mikefrommontana"]Do you have the original material certifications for those flues? Not much point explaining to your friendly boiler inspector where the "mystery flues" came from (especially for applications outside of the FRA bounded railroad universe).

If you have the certs, you might want to let the steam traction community know about the flues as well.

You may have a hard time convincing an inspector that the used tubes you have are certified with a particular piece of paper (cert). To use the words I once heard from a government inspector. "How can you prove to me that this material is what you tell me it is. I don't see any markings or heat numbers that link the two".

I don't have the section number from the CFR part 230 however their is a section that allows for tubes, partial, to be left in for the 1472 day overhaul. These are not the exact words however if the soundness of the tubes can be proved then enough may be removed so that a man, inspector, can inspect the boiler from the interior. This then would leave the majority in place.

When all is said and done though it is better to pull all, do the work and assemble the boiler with new materials.

The railroads used to generate a lot of used tubes, and found many ways to reuse them. In addition to pilots, tubes have been used for telltales, storage racks, ROW fencing, and many other things. Boiler tubes still support much of the barbed wire that divides pasture from ROW in Niles Canyon. I hope to someday see SP 2472 with a boiler tube pilot (at least for a few operations).

One of the belt-driven machines at Railtown is a tube tumbler. Tubes were coated in scale after use in a boiler, and needed a little clean-up before re-use. It is simply a long drum with holes in it, so that as tubes bounced around in there the scale came off. I bet it was noisy, and this might be one reason it was located outside of the machine shop.
O. Anderson