Sunday 21st September 2025, 1.15pm (day 5,141)
On my regular visits to London I have been walking past this statuesque chap since 2016. The sculpture is of Sir Nigel Gresley, designer of the famous Mallard locomotive, which still holds the speed record for a steam locomotive. The statue is about 7 feet high — Sir Nigel wasn’t, though. Apparently, the design was to have originally featured a duck (that is, a mallard) as well as Sir Nige, but this was left off in the end, after, and I quote the Guardian (via Wikipedia) here; “possibly the most acrimonious argument in the long, pedantic history of the railway hobbyist”.
Being 42 
[…] so I joined the crowd for a minute or two. The Sir Nigel Gresley, named after the engineer whose oversized statue now stands at King’s Cross, holds the post-war steam speed record of 112mph — and unlike Mallard this speed was achieved […]