Bacup has a lot of them, mainly stone built and from what I can see on Google Streetview, mainly on hills. This looks like a gem in the making, have often looked at the same page in the NorthWest book myself and thought what a good model Baccup would make. The first serious proposal in the early 1980s, to make the school part of local further education college, was fiercely resisted and finally defeated.

In total, it took over three months (including the station building itself and the platform) and still needs a bit more weathering and detail adding. The second attempt, in 1985, to recognise along comprehensive lines and amalgamate the school with one of its neighbouring secondary modern schools came too late. The Industrial Revolution transformed Bacup in to a prosperous Mill Town, with many large cotton mills benefiting from the close proximity to the River Irwell, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and the growth of the regional railway network. The problems I was faced with were getting the pointwork and track to flow correctly from the platform ends, without 's' bending (as they did in the original print out), fitting in two crossovers and all other pointwork in 5' (also ensuring that no point motors would be in awkward positions, e.A more recent tradition, but one that has certainly gathered pace and literally world-wide interest, is the Annual Gravy Wrestling Championships, held every August Bank Holiday at the Rose and Bowl, a couple of miles out of the town centre; grown men and women battling it out in a huge pool a gravy is certainly something to behold! There are 12 pitches, each one glazed with the one above the longer platform building being only partly so.

Construction of these is as follows (with no real difference between the plastikard and mounting board formed ones). The Festival’s main aim is to attract and expose visitors to the beauty, heritage and culture of Rossendale.

As such, I am sure that my trackwork will shock those with knowledge of such things and I am sure that I will need to revisit certain elements of it at a later date but it is giving me immense satisfaction to be starting with a bag of bullhead rail, a bag of PCB and a length of solder and end up with a turnout that seems to work. In addition, pupils undertake a period study focusing on conflict and tension: the inter-war years, 1918–1939. I had the book on the go for the last six months and I kept picking it up and putting it down, but my family encouraged me to finish it off.