Miniature Wonderland in Hamburg

In 2000, two German twin brothers Frederick and Gerrit Braun, aged 41, began to work on the ‘Miniatur Wunderland' which is a model railway attraction in Hamburg, Germany and the largest of this kind in the world.

In January, 2011, the railway consists of 12,000 metres of track in HO scale, divided into 7 sections: Harz, the fictitious city of Knuffingen, the Alps and Austria, Hamburg, America, Scandinavia and Switzerland.

The American section features giant models of the Rocky Mountains, Everglades, Grand-Canyon etc and Mount Rushmore.The Swiss section has a mini-Matterhorn.
The Scandinavian part has a 1.23-metre long passenger ship floating in a 'fjord'.

The Wonderland is expected to be finished in 2014, when the train set would cover more than 1,800 square meters and feature almost 21 kilometres of track, by which time detailed models of parts of France, Italy and the UK would have been added. It comprises 700 trains with more than 10,000 carriages and wagons. The longest train is 14 metres long. The scenery includes 900 signals, 2,800 buildings, 4,000 cars - many with illuminated headlights... ...and 160,000 individually designed figures.

Thousands of kilograms of steel and wood were used to construct the scenery... The 250,000 lights are rigged up to a system that mimics night and day by automatically turning them on and off.

The whole system is controlled from a massive high-tech nerve centre. In total the set has taken 500,000 hours and more than 8 million euro to put together, the vast majority of which has come from ticket sales.

By 2020, the exhibits expected to have reached its final construction phase, including at least a total of 10 sections in a model area of over 2,300 square metres. The section of an airport, named Hamburg International Airport, has been opened in May 2011. The exhibits includes 890 trains made up of over 11,000 carriages, 300,000 lights, 215,000 trees and 200,000 human figures. The creators will work on models of Italy and France. Soon a new airport called Knuffingen International Airport will be completed. Possible future additions include Africa, England or even a futuristic landscape.


Please visit the website at http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/exhibit/video/4-minutes-wunderland/