Greetings:
No. 319 has a wagon top boiler with a keyhole firebox with crown bars.
John Thompson had it at the Illinois Central roundhouse at Markham, IL. When it was first unloaded, the Foreman, Irv Kaufran (who was a steam man and Dick Jensen's main adviser) looked it over and said it wasn't worth trying to repair as the boiler was terribly (and extensively) pitted. John went ahead and hired a boiler shop that did many tens of thousands of dollars work on the firebox, including a new mudring and large sections of the wrapper sheet. When they went to hydro it, it wouldn't hold water because the dry pipe was wasted. Why didn't they inspect the dry pipe you ask? Remember, it has a crown bar firebox and typically with crown bar fireboxes, the steam dome is directly over the firebox, so you can't get inside the boiler without taking out a lot of crown bars (which would have been a big project as they were all very heavily covered with hard scale). They got a new dry pipe installed, but never were able to do a hydro test due to all the other leaks that became evident once the boiler was filled with water.
At that point John gave up.
We got it (and the Coronet Phosphate No.9, a 2-6-2T now at Illinois Railway Museum) ready to move on their own wheels over the Illinois Central main line from Markham to Monee where cranes were used to put them onto trailers and then moved to John's winery (a whole story itself).
Be well,
J.David
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