All right, I'll bite.
"Most of us know of the #9 [...] and have seen the photos of a delapidated, unreinforced lap-seam boiler with a patch on the crown sheet"
First of all, you spend so much time railing on Railstar for their unprofessional website and misspellings, and then you misspell "delapidated". Does this mean your post is unprofessional and I should laugh it off? For the sake of argument I have taken it seriously.
Second of all, The only pictures I've seen of #9 anytime recently were taken by me. If by "delapidated" you mean "has some white paint on it" then I agree. Otherwise you would seem to be plain wrong. My understanding is that as far as anyone knows so far (not sure needle scaling's been done yet), the boiler on 9 is in much better shape than anyone thought. Certainly in better shape than 30's.
So why not lay off the comments about how 9 is going to kill us all. Uhrich is doing the locomotive restoration work. HE is telling the CHS what needs to be done, not the other way around. And all of his work I have seen completed (car on Boreas pass, #30's tender) has been fantastic. Since he's in charge, I see no reason to assume that this work will be anything different. The new operator may take a nice new loco and run it into the ground, but even that seems less likely given their new GM’s resume.
I have tried to distribute information on this site that might be of interest to readers. But if the only result of my providing information is so that it can be misconstrued to fit an agenda then I’ll stop. Saying that ‘no work looks like it has been done on 9’ is fair. Implying that 9 has a dilapidated boiler and a shoddy restoration work is unwarranted. Saying 9 is too lightweight for the loop is fair. Saying it will be unsafe is not. Until it has been proven differently, I’d appreciate seeing some respect on this site for Uhrich.
Chris Weaver