Author of Ed Engoron’s Choclatique, Running Press, 2011
Here’s a train that’s always on time! Chocolate artist Andrew Farrugia spent over 700 hours constructing his masterpiece—a train made entirely of chocolate. This chocolate sculpture set a Guinness World Record as the longest chocolate structure in the world—112 feet long weighing over 2,800 pounds.
Located at Brussels’ busy South Station, Farrugia claims to have come up with the idea for a chocolate train sculpture after visiting the Belgian Chocolate Festival in Bruges last year.
“I had this idea for a while,” he said. “What do you think if we do this realization of a long chocolate train, you know, because make a train as long as you like.”
The original plan was a more modest size train, but it just kept getting longer, car after car after car. Farrugia had previously built a smaller 12-foot train for an event in Malta, which he said gave him insight about how to build this larger version.
There are two parts to the train. The first seven cars are modeled after the Belgian trains of today, and the rest of the train is modeled after older train cars, including the bar and restaurant car. I’ll bet they serve chocolate mousse for dessert.
Three days before the event, Farrugia transported the chocolate train by truck in 25 wooden boxes from Malta to Belgium. After measuring the length of the train and confirming no material other than chocolate was used, the officials from the Guinness Book of World Records added a new category to the collection of world records and declared the train to be the longest chocolate structure in the world.


The good people at
Francois Melle, Quina corporate pastry chef, led the effort, with help from top craftsman Stephane Treand. The project time exceeded over 400 hours of construction. The attention to detail is extraordinary. The structure is exactly proportional to its inspiration, down to the number of steps, walls and panels. It’s one-thirtieth the size of the original with a base of 10 feet by 10 feet and six feet tall. Melle studied Mayan pyramids to create the exact replica of the Temple.