Y'all welcome, just one other small point, the centre dias is actually removable and not fitted to the drivers dias as seen above, it should actually fit between the pipework for the injector valves. This does reduce the space on the right for the firemans foot but the principle is still valid. to be fair the dias isn't very deep (12-14" or something) and you could still reach the fire hole if your foot was hard up against the edge.
The Coronation is a different type of firebox, specifically the grate, the Gresley firebox is a gradual slope from rear to front (heel to toe) and has a tall back, eight feet or more. The Coronation has a flat grate initially and then a much steeper front section, as such the height at the rear is 7'-2", about a foot shorter than the Gresley backhead, on top of that the Coronation floor is raised another 10" above the heel of the firebox, that'll give you roughly 6' - 4" from floor to top of backhead. It does mean that the firehole door is much lower, under two feet off the floor, I presume this is more in line with the firing technique used for the stepped grate than the one used for the constant sloped grate.
My mate who was a fireman at Cricklewood preferred the LMS/BR style with the lower firehole, Black fives, Jubilees, 8Fs and 9F's, I suppose it's apples and pears.
I've got a couple of Coronations to build shortly and really looking forward to it and finally getting a Crewe North engine.
Cantilever footplates have their own issues, something to do with airflow underneath them creating a vacuum or eddies which basically fill the cab with any bit of grit or dirt you can find in a mini tornado, hence the fitting of curtains to Britannias and Standard fives to prevent this, it only happened at higher speeds. The same effect was present on the A4, Peppercorn A1 and un rebuilt Bullieds if the curtain between cab top and tender got torn or removed then the cab was inhospitable at higher speeds. There's a tale in one of the Townsend books of the up Elizabethan loosing the roof cover at high speed north of York, the driver ended up making a large brake application to reduce speed as the crew were basically being shot blasted in the cab, the engine limped to York where it was exchanged.
The problem was mitigated on the A3 by lowering the streamlined fairing on the top of the tender front, though not as prone as engines with V cabs it was still unpleasant when coupled to high sided tenders, dropping the middle (crown) of the tender front fairing broke the slipstream and vacuum effect and cleared the cab.
Anyway, enough digression.
) the cusp removing from the top part. 