Engineering students from Queen’s University in Belfast (www.qub.ac.uk) have established a world record for the largest-ever Meccano construction — a 100ft footbridge.

Around 11,000 pieces of Meccano were used to build the bridge, which weighs 600kg. Representatives from The Guinness Book of World Records were on site on 19 September to confirm the achievement.

The year-long project was part of the university’s out-reach programme to encourage more children to consider careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects.

Danny McPolin, who led the project, said: “If you count all the nuts and bolts and washers, there are around 70,000 items. If all the longer pieces were laid end to end, I think they would add up to about 3.8km — that is a lot of Meccano.”

He added: “We see this event not only as an opportunity to celebrate the students’ and staff’s incredible work over the past year, but also as a chance to give local children an insight into the exciting courses on offer at Queen’s. We hope to cement their interest in studying engineering and other STEM subjects at university level.”

Professor Trevor Whittaker from Queen’s University Belfast walked across the bridge wearing a harness, watched by a crowd of hundreds.

Afterwards, he said: “Why was I wearing a harness? It’s a bridge made of Meccano by students, do I look stupid? We are basically training young people — training them to think, training them to dream — but dreaming is not enough, you have to take the thing to another stage, you have to deliver at the end of the day.”

He added: “Queen’s offers an array of opportunities to enable students to develop key skills through industry placements and ‘study abroad’ schemes. As the bridge build has shown, we work closely with industry to anticipate their needs and to ensure the relevancy of our courses to employers.

"A lot of engineers have probably grown to like engineering through playing with toys like Meccano.”

Meccano is a model-construction system that was created by Frank Hornby in 1898 and promoted as “mechanics made easy”.