Steam Boiler

[Azzanine]

Gameplay.

Railcraft wins hand down for doing something interesting to produce a useful result rather than the plug and play simply handing it over on a silver platter.​

I don't know, some people may find buiding a structure that costs 72 iron/steel and in regular circumstances requires nether materials. (If you settle for a smaller boiler this cost can be smaller and certain mods can make blaze powder pre nether)
Some may find a magical steam box to be a more satisfying option. Building a multiblock and waiting for heat up might be anti gameplay.
However I think saying there's no point to RC boilers is silly considering they where the first to do the whole steam thing.

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[DriftinFool]

To me, the biggest drawback to a RailCraft 36HP Boiler is the stupidity of the heat-up period. I'm OK with it using a crapton of iron/steel. I'm OK with it exploding under certain circumstances. I'm hesitant on saying I'm OK with the amount of fuel it uses, but charcoal is easy enough to mass produce. The waiting kills it.

These days, my average length of play session is around an hour and a half. If I build a 36HP Boiler, I'll likely retire before the thing gets heated up enough to use.

There is a way to heat them up very fast. There's an ore in the nether under the lava that you can refine into a "lava crystal"? I think that's the name of it. Once you make one, you toss it into a large pool of lava and it absorbs it. Once it's full, you just put it in the fuel slot of your boiler and it heats up- at a significantly higher rate than with any fuel.

 

[LoGaL]

i think he refers to the fact that once the boiler is on, it has to be on forever, otherwise you have to heat it up again
I am sure you can't use the heatstone every time you need to switch up something

 

[KingTriaxx]

Firestone holds 1k charges and is rechargeable. It doesn't break permanently if it's drained though. It becomes cracked and has to be re-refined and then recharged. A lot of railcraft spotlights use them to run locomotives unless they're showing off fuel loading. And the only time you'd have to restart one is if you reconfigure it. IE go from 1x1 to 2x2 for example.