For a difficult situation, that sounds like encouraging news. Who pays for all the rebuild of the rebuild? Or shouldn't I ask.

Tom

Very interesting! Shame about the problems, but hopefully all will come together successfully and there will be a like new locomotive on the road.
Good luck!

Very interesting pc to read. Make no comments on the workmanship or design as this is way past my ability to accurately comment. But.......... I do see this as a heads up for museums who decide to have a new boiler fabricated rather than do extensive repairs to existing boilers. I am not against building new replacement boilers, to be clear. Just feel a lot can be learned from ones mistakes and a lot can be learned from others mistakes.

The point is that you really need to have your ducks in a row and have competent people running the project. You may have a new boiler built but if you think it is going to be equivalent to dropping in a overhauled Cummings think again. Many unforeseen things can pop up, from design, fabrication errors made and final fit up, not to mention final FRA approval.

Back a few years ago when the "head of steam locomotives" {forget the proper title} talked of building a new boiler for the CN&W #1385, I started thinking about it and on my own talked to some folks who had gone down this route. Started looking and found many failed attempts to build replacement boilers. It certainly can be done and in a lot of cases might make sense to go this route. Again I am not against new boilers. The success rates in building new boilers that both fit and pass FRA standards has been a very slippery slope. No body goes into a project of this scope and tries to screw up, but it is very easy to do.

Hire professionals with experience and go slowly, very slowly. Congrats to Montello group on a job well done. I think Texas State RR has/had a new boiler running. Not sure if they have another on the ground? But I seriously hope anybody {???} going this route will talk to those who have gone before them and listen to their stories. Cheers, John.

TSRR has no fewer than three 'new' boilers; the replacement boiler for 201, the replacement boiler for 300, and the uninstalled replacement for 500.

201 (the 4-6-0) had already been done and requalified when AHR took over from Texas Parks.

The 300 (Pershing 2-8-0) was a fabricated ASTM boiler by Dixon. It was basically just a 'big dumb' boiler, very little additional bracing, just very thick material. It had not been recertified to current FRA but didn't have any problems meeting the Form 4 when it was redone in 2009. I was a little concerned myself about the dome calcs, but it was unwarranted.

400 - the ex-Magma Arizona 2-8-2, is in the shops now. Original Baldwin boiler, having boiler work done now.

500 (ATSF 4-6-2) is still a ways off - it will be the last of the group brought back.

So far my only observation has been that an ASTM boiler made to ABSOLUTE MINIMUM spec may certainly have issues with the CFR, we didn't have that problem.

reminded me of this NASA oops. Some support screws either got stolen or forgotten to be placed.

For those who look for this kind of boiler work, before delivery, have ready your own inspection team to go look at it with measurements, drawings in hand, then say yay/nay.

Hurray for success stories and I mean that, seriously. Had talked to a guy who had been involved with the first boiler at TSRR. He, at that time gave a lot of credit to the guys involved in the fitting and final installation of the new boiler or boilers. Not saying it can't or shouldn't be done, but you need some very good help to make it happen is all.

In my younger days as a welder I worked for an old time company that built most everything in house. We fabricated, machined and assembled probably 80 to 90 % of the machines we built. Many were new designs and either one of a kind or only a couple of one kind. Point is when a new design hits the floor you have a tremendous amount of room for Mr. Murphy to do his thing. Engineering mistakes, material screw ups {bad steel, wrong steel, no certs steel, ect}, then you have the fitting and welding. Does the fitter go to lunch and come back and accidently preform some human mistake like putting a pc 6" the wrong side of CL? Does the welder take a liquid lunch and do a less than stellar job? Does the crane operator drop it hard when turning it over and bend things just a little? When you have a product that has a proven design such as a catalog boiler on a 1928 Balwin locomotive it will probably work ok and be within working limits in both design and workmanship. When you build something new you and Mr. Murphy have ample room to screw up. Engineering technology has come a long way since 1970 and many old time screw ups might be rectified by these wonderful aids, but building a new boiler with design changes or even without is a huge undertaking. For someone in the business of making new FRA qualified boilers maybe not so much, but the people who do this and are successful are few and far between. Hence my suggestion of hiring people with a proven track record.

Know very little about the "down under" boiler, but their lesson should be our lesson. Every failure in making new boilers should be studied carefully so it isn't repeated over and over again. Just throwing money at a locomotive will not make it run. Best of luck to all involved. Cheers, John.

There is a lot that can be learned by issues that come up during and after a restoration. Education, no matter how you get it (formal schooling or school of experience and hard knocks) is costly. I wish people could just leave their egos/criticism behind and share the good and the bad, so that others can avoid making those same mistakes, and spending time and money on issues whose answers are already known but kept behind a locked closet door. We are all humans (I hope) and we have all made errors and hopefully do not repeat them. Hopefully, the issues and resolutions with the A1 and 3801 boilers will be released so that we can all learn from them. Designing locomotive boilers never was an exact science that could be solved all with mathematical formulas, it still used empirical knowledge gained from previously built boilers, some great some not so great.

Mike Tillger