On with the cab roof and some of the boiler fittings. I test-fitted the Urie stovepipe chimney but it clobbered my footbridge, so pragmatism dictated that I used the other one supplied with the kit, which appears to be a representation of the U1 chimney fitted to members of the class.

I then ran into the first minor snag of the body, in that the front of the boiler should be flush with the point where the inside part of the frames drops down, but is in fact set back by about 0.5mm. This means that the supplied smokebox doors can't be fitted without modification. I could have set the boiler flush when assembling it, but if I'd done that I'd only have run into an equivalent problem at the cab end, and on balance I think the smokebox is more easily fixed. I'll go over this when I get to it - at the moment the smokebox door, like the money in Father Ted Crilly's account, is "just resting" in place.

I was interested in how the general proportions stack up against the works drawing, so I tried superimposing my side view of the model on the GA drawing as reproduced in Peter Swift's book on the class. I trust this doesn't violate copyright as the works drawing is not original to the book.

The comparison isn't ideal as my model photo as some perspective distortion at the extremities, but I think it's accurate enough to highlight the basic issues:

There are some inaccuracies with regard to the position of the boiler fittings, and the wheelbase of the bogie seems too short (edit: in fact it isn't), but it's not as bad as I'd feared, especially with regard to the general proportions and height. Incidentally the drawing shows the stovepipe chimney, not the one fitted to the model. The LSWR did have a generous loading gauge, and some of my RTR locos aren't terribly happy under the low Ratio footbridge, so it's not necessarily the case that the stovepipe is too tall. Indeed, if and when I run the S15, it'll be when the layout is running under Southern conditions, with a different footbridge entirely, so I could get away with it if I wished. But for now the U1 chimney is tacked into place, until the moment when have to make the decision final.