From his first encounter as a child with a model that seemed more like a spaceship than a locomotive, author William Brown has been fascinated by 10000. Meticulous research, involving hundreds of documents, has allowed him to piece together for the first time the true story of this intriguing part of LNER history, and the far-reaching effects it had on steam locomotive development. Dissatisfied with all the previously available published works about this unique locomotive, the author took advantage of working at the National Railway Museum to seek out as much primary source material as he could find, culminating in the discovery of “the file” – a wide-ranging and motley collection of original North Road Works documentation relating to the locomotive. The sheer volume of information (most of it out of chronological order, and including original memos from Gresley to Bulleid, Thompson, and the like) took months and years to sort and collate, but the result is a book that, for the first time, chronicles the full story of Gresley’s “Hush-Hush” project.