100ft Meccano Bridge In World Record Bid

Speaking ahead of the inspection by world record officials, Dr McPolin said he was hopeful the structure would measure up.

Representatives from Guinness World Records were on site to confirm it had set a record for the world’s largest ever Meccano construction.

It’s a little over 30 metres long and is made up of 11 000 parts held together by 17, 000 nuts and bolts.

A group of third year engineering students from Queen’s University Belfast constructed the bridge.

The academic, who told onlookers taxpayers had helped fund the project, declared: “What you are investing in is the future of our society, without education, without training young people, without exploiting their talents we simply will not have the structures that we have”.

“It is easy to build structures massively strong, with masses of metal in them”.

For those who don’t know Meccano is a model construction system created in Liverpool, United Kingdom by Frank Hornby.

“Something like civil engineering has basically shaped all of civilisation, all society that is around us”. It consists of re-usable metal strips, plates, angle girders, wheels, axles and gears, with nuts and bolts to connect the pieces.

They tested whether it was possible to walk across it at Clarendon Dock with a Meccano robot.

“With a growing skill shortage in Civil engineering, we hope that our work will encourage more children to consider the study of civil engineering and other STEM subjects at University level”, Dr McPolin said.

The Big Bridge Build project, which includes 11,000 pieces of Meccano and has taken a year to create, has already attracted attention from the engineering and architectural world.

The project has received funding from the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure, AECOM, Meccano and Queen’s Annual Fund.