Most carriages in a toy train

The most carriages in a toy train is 101, and was achieved by Alexander Blong (New Zealand) in Auckland, New Zealand, on 14 May 2022.

Alexander has always had an interest in building with LEGO. He received his first set at the age of 4 years old. Since then, his passion has evolved. He enjoys building, creating and designing different structures as he believes it's a great way to build a physical object from your imagination, and it encourages creativity. He has been making MOC LEGO creations since the age of 6 and is also a part of a few LEGO user groups.

The Netflix series Snowpiercer inspired Alexander to build a 101 carriage long LEGO train. He enthuses "I knew that building it out of LEGO was going to look so amazing and awesome."

It took Alexander roughly 50 hours to build all the carriages and on the day of the attempt, he had a team of around 10 people helping him connect the track and carriages for the official event. He was personally in charge of building the carriages along with designing the locomotive. His dad helped manage everything else!

Alexander is a student, so amongst all the school work and studying, he was only able to work on the project part time. He used all his free time to prepare and organise the attempt. He is fortunate that he had more time over the summer break (with the New Zealand summer being December-January)

There was a lot of testing involved before the attempt as he had to ensure that the locomotive could pull the weight of the trailing carriages along the plastic track. He had set up the train tracks along the hallway of his house for about a month while he was testing and making changes to the locomotive. On the official day, they ran more testing and it was all going smoothly until the whole train refused to move. This was a huge worry as it was unexpected but he knew there would be a way to solve the issue. They got to the route of the problem and realised it was due to the Bluetooth connection from the controller to the power hub which was being interfered by members of the public's phones who had Bluetooth switched on. Once everyone turned off their Bluetooth, everything was back on track.

When asked about how members of the public reacted to Alexander's train, he explains "The public reacted to the train in all different ways. Some of the people that turned up knew about what it was, but a lot of them had no idea and were quite interested in what was happening. Earlier in the day the radio had advertised the GWR attempt and when it was taking place, so lots of people turned up, rather excited to see what was going to happen. All ages from pre-schoolers to grandparents managed to come along. Even staff from the Britomart station all gathered around to witness and join in the excitement! Even the local florist came to watch and then gave me red flowers to say congratulations!"

"Honestly, holding a Guinness World Records title is absolutely amazing and a life achievement! I would always watch YouTube videos of other GWR titles being broken (mostly LEGO ones) and I always wanted to one day break one for myself. I remember at primary school going to the library the first book kids would rush to would be the GWR book and looking at all the achievements of people. This is truly incredible and inspires me to dream and create bigger projects. I think being a GWR title holder would also inspire others even though they are young age is no barrier to setting a goal and achieving success. This title would also mean a lot to the supporters that helped and were part of the team effort."