Whitford teen Alexander Blong has officially made it into the Guinness World Record (GWR) book.
Alexander, 14, has been successful in gaining the Guinness World Record for ‘Most carriages in a toy train is 101’ pulled by a locomotive.
Alexander has always had an interest in building with Lego. He received his first set at the age of four.
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 [My Own Creation] Lego creations since he was 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. “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.
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.
“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.”
