THOUSANDS of Lego fans made their way to Steam over the course of the weekend for the museum’s busiest event of the year.

The Great Western Brick Show filled the halls of the popular railway museum with hundreds of displays of awe-inspiring creations – each built from Lego bricks. From working model railway sets to The Millennium Falcon, as well as HMS Victory, there was a huge variety of carefully built pieces, as well as a number of smaller, intricate exhibits.

At the heart of the exhibition, sitting alongside the Caerphilly Castle locomotive, was an expansive recreation of Hadrians Wall built by Lego builders Jimmy Clinch, Steve Snasdell, James Pegrum, Dan Harris, Barney Main and Simon Pickard – who completed the look by attending the show in full Roman centurion costume.

Despite living at opposite ends of the country from each other – with Dan hailing from the Cairngorms in Scotland and James living in Devon, with each of the other members living in between – they spent the past 12 months meticulously building their section of the display, before it all came together and was assembled into one piece on Friday.

Jimmy revealed that between them they weren’t sure exactly how many pieces had been used to build the impressive landscape, but it had to be in the tens of thousands of pieces overall.

He said: “We knew we were going to do the Roman theme before last year’s show when we did Victorian England and we started building just after the show – we wanted to do something completely different.

“Because we all live so far apart we share images on Flikr and Skype each other to show how we’re doing it. James is a structural engineer, so he drew up a plan of the base plates and we went from there. Considering it is the biggest one we have done so far it was actually the easiest one to go together.”

Museum services delivery co-ordinator Julie Bacon revealed the museum had welcomed in the region of 3,500 people through its doors on Sunday, and expected a similar number on Sunday too.

She said: “On Sunday morning they were queued all the way down and around the building waiting to get in.”

President of the Brickish Association and co-organiser of the show Martin Long said: “What people are seeing here are things that people have built at home and brought along to show. For us it is lovely to come to Steam, it is an amazing museum. We started here in 2002 so the show has been running for quite a long time now and it has got bigger and bigger from just trains back in the early days to everything you could think of under the sun.

“A lot of members of the public really like some of the smaller pieces on display, because it inspires them to go home and try and build it themselves. That is really what this whole show is all about, bringing people here to inspire them.”