The Pendle Forest MRS are a friendly bunch of model railway enthusiasts with a wide range of modelling skills.
We meet every Tuesday & Thursday evenings in Brierfield.
Our visit to Marl
We were recently invited to take part in an arts and crafts organised by Pendle’s Twin Town of Marl in Germany. We took our 00 layout ‘Ecclesford Junction’ and we were pleased to be joined by our railway modeling friends from Pendle’s other Twinned town of Creil in France who brought their large HO layout.
The event was held in a museum on the site of a former iron ore mine on the edge of Marl, and was open from March 28th to April 1st.
The exhibition was very well attended and an enthusiastic audience took great delight in watching the railway in operation as well as ‘discovering’ the many operating cameo features that society members have built by the trackside. Working televisions in the HiFi shop window created a good deal of interest, the tea drinking workmen and the operating road drill caused many smiles and one lady was almost moved to tears when she was told that the names on the church gravestones were in memory of our deceased Society members.
Visitors of all ages were able to operate some of the cameos themselves using push buttons and there was an endless queue of youngsters wanting to ‘have a go’!
As guests of the Marl Twinning Association we were well looked after and during our short stay we were treated to a trip around various scenic landmarks – these included an upside down WWII locomotive ‘La Tortuga’, a ‘Tetrahedron’ built on a former slag heap that afforded good views of the surrounding countryside and a visit to the ‘Akedemie Mont Cenis’ – a glass building with a roof mounted solar panel array that produces 700 megawatts of energy per year.
The event aroused a good deal of local and media interest whilst we were there and everyone seemed very pleased at the success of our visit. As an exercise in combining model railways with Town Twinning it was certainly a most enjoyable experience.
DC 30.4.12
