Re: What is wrong with No. 9?

Kevin,
This was sent to me by another source that actually worked on or with the #9:
"The #9 was a rushed restoration and a rushed restoration by Uhrich's shops....corners are cut, pieces are machined with very poor quality and everything is assembled without precision. Basically, the #9 arrived with a nice cosmetic restoration but without working guts.
The air lines were plugged, the water line had a filter that blocked intake, the dynamo didn't work, the burner wasn't aimed properly, the injectors didn't work (which was why #9 did only one run on the 4th of July), the side rods weren't tight, the headlight was wired wrong, all the pipe fittings leaked, the brake valves had bad parts and didn't work and so on. After a test run, a lot of time was spent pulling off all the piping, cleaning it, making sure the joints didn't leak and putting it all back together correctly (the first way made no sense and it was inconvenient to reach the firing controls), re-brick the fire box and center the pettycoat pipe.
After a few revenue runs, all of the newly machined parts Uhrich's put on wore out and more had to be redone. The staybolt problems were actually caused by an old C&S practice of leaving the old stays in the boiler which created hot spots and caused strain on the new ones and this was a problem the ultrasound couldn't detect"...
That's quite a litany of problems! However, it DOES answer a lot of the questions that I had about the delay in getting #9 up and running and also ties in with what we are finding out even now!