According to The Guardian, all is not well in the train aficionado community:
A statue of Sir Nigel Gresley is due to be unveiled in April, marking the 75th anniversary of the death of the designer of the Mallard steam engine. But there is a risk that his achievements will be eclipsed by an arcane dispute that started in the letters pages of local and national newspapers and quickly escalated on social media. At the heart of the row is the decision by the Gresley Society to drop its commitment for the statue’s original design to include a mallard at Sir Nigel’s feet. Campaigners are plotting to make their own avian additions when the 7ft-high bronze of Gresley, commissioned from sculptor Hazel Reeves, is unveiled at London’s King’s Cross station on 5 April.
So basically, the idea was to put a duck at the base of the statue as a reference to the Mallard, the famous steam engine. The Gresley Society dropped this after raising a lot of money on the back of the idea. Now campaigners are threatening to put plastic ducks on the statue at every opportunity.
Here’s the thing. You’re walking with your kids through King’s Cross Station and there’s the Harry Potter trolley attraction (which now seems to have a permanent queue even late at night) or a statue of a famous, but not that well-known, engineer. Which is likely to fire their imagination more? The statue of the engineer, or the statue of the man with the duck? Which one encourages your kids to learn about the story of the man’s achievements? It’s the duck.
This seems to be an example of design (or redesign) by committee. A really good idea gets dismissed because someone thinks it’s silly. But the duck was a masterstroke. What a shame it’s been ditched.
Ducking idiots.