A new boiler has been delivered to a Maine Museum so they can get this beast up and running...
http://www.wcsh6.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=111107&catid=2

O.

I've never seen a shrink wrapped boiler before.

That is an interesting contraption. Part locomotive, part bulldozer, and part snowmobile.

For a brief history go here:
http://oldsnowplowequipment.wetpaint.com/page/Lombard+Loghaulers+and+Tractors

The Lombard was indeed closely related to the steam locomotive, and to the origination of the crawler tractor. Moreover, the crawler tractor is highly analogous to railroads. Both the railroad system and the crawler tractor system spread their weight out onto a broad area for ground support. Both systems refer to this load carrying mechanism as a track. Both systems transmit the load through flanged, rolling elements, which are wheels on railroads and rollers on crawlers. One name for the link chains that crawlers run their rollers on is “rails.” Railroad ties are analogous to the grouser plates of crawlers.

Most railroading is adhesion or friction drive, whereas crawlers are directly analogous to cog railroads where the drive sprocket engages the pins and bushings of the link chains as if they were a rack.

Unlike railroads, crawler tractors lay their track down ahead of their travel and pick it up when they have passed. That is why crawlers or track type tractors came to be called tracklayers in the early days of their development.

As an interesting aside, the Lombard tractors are related to the army tank, also. The article mentions that the Phoenix Manufacturing Company of Eau Clair, Wisconsin was one of the companies that licensed the Lombard design. Phoenix was served by the Soo Line, and somewhere I've seen reprint of the Soo employee magazine that had a photo of the army tanks Phoenix was building for the British Army about 1917 or so. They were the design shaped like a parallelogram with the tracks around their perimeter.