Hutch,

The CP Huntington will not operationally restored any time soon, or even in the distant future for that matter. The idea was floated about 10 years ago to restore it to operating condition since the SP had it running as late as the 40s and probably wasn't too bad off. The engine was taken out of the display are and moved into the backshop. The jacket was removed as well as many other item to judge its potential.

Several items came up that stopped that idea but the biggest was this:

The age of the steel in the boiler had no bearing on the decision, steel can be replaced. The big problem was the fact that the boiler was a lap-seam design rather than the newer and safer butt-strap design. Lap seam boilers are highly frowned upon by the FRA due to their potenttal for catastrophic failure along the rivets of the lap-seam barrel. If the locomotive were to be restored with the current boiler, it could only operate and a vastly reduced boiler pressure. The other option was to build a new boiler for it, which would not only be expensive, but take away much of the historical value of the locomotive.

Another problem was the crosshead water pump which is illegal for use under FRA rules. Crosshead water pumps are bad for 2 reasons. They only pump cold water into the boiler (whereas feedwater pumps and injectors heat the water before entering the boiler and reduce stress) and the only work when the engine is moving. A second injector would have to be added to make the locomotive safe for use and since that was non-standard equipment, it ruin the historical nature of the locomotive.

In the end, it was decided to leave it alone and leave it shined up and on display.

As for the boilers that were found in the swamp during soil clean up, those were tossed in there by the SP many many moons ago. They found those about 12-15 years ago and did a little research on why they weren't tossed in the scrap bin. They were remnants of experiments the SP did with old boilers to test failure limits on locomotive boilers. Basically they would pump them up with water over pressure, drain them, fill them, drain them, again and again until they failed. What the heck, they were just gonna toss them out anyways, might as well use them for something. What the SP was looking for was how continued stress from pressure flucuations would cause failures in locomotive boilers and where.