It's Sunday, so no building, but that doesn't preclude thinking. I woke up thinking about boiler flues and realized that I may have to rethink the whole lighting affair. The lighting system was clever, but maybe too clever since I built it before actually having the boilers ready to be placed inside. The n-gauge track might be a problem (so I imagined lying in bed). Well... it most certainly is a problem! I took this picture showing where the flues go and the track is right over top of where the flues go up through the roof.
In Scotch, reverse flow boilers, the flues come off the boiler front. I could re-route the steam lines forward and run the flues out the back and then just rename the boilers to double-reverse flow boilers (which are also prototypical. That might be an easier approach since I can spread the n-gauge rails around the flues as they head to the roof and there's more rail overhanging the back than the front. In my prototype picture, you can clearly see the flues going up from the boiler front.
There's also that interesting shunt pipe rising up to meet it. I really wanted to duplicate this complexity. So the second idea would be to completely re-do the lighting scheme. I have those lighting strips that I used on the fire house. They're really bright and could be mounted higher in the building which would open up the overhead space where the n-gauge rails now exist. I won't destroy the n-gauge setup since it can be used in another installation. Note the little air compressor which apparently must provide combustion air to the burner, but it may be something else. Anyone have any ideas? Tomorrow I'll work all of this out.
