Miniatur Wunderland

After another unexciting travel day to get to Hamburg yesterday, we walked around the town a bit but found that, compared to Berlin, Hamburg is rather small and unexciting.  It’s a nice town and Hamburgers (that’s really what the people of Hamburg are called!) are quite friendly and helpful (the staff at the Ibis we’re staying at are by far the nicest of any Ibis we’ve been to thus far), but none of the general sights really appealed to us, so we decided to do something a bit different today and spent the day at a place called Miniature Wunderland instead of walking around sightseeing.  This turned out to be one of the coolest things we’ve done so far and if you ever travel to Germany, make sure you go to Hamburg to check out Minature Wunderland – it will amaze you!!!

In case you’re like me and never heard of Minature Wunderland before, it’s the world’s largest model railway, currently containing over 9000 meters of track with over 890 trains.  They’ve put in more than 500,00 hours of labour so far to put together over 3000 buildings and bridges and 200,000 figures on 1150 m² of model area which are broken down into 7 phases/parts of the world, ranging from Germany to America.  There are miniature train stations and garages, a firehall, an amusement park complete with rides, a football stadium, the Las Vegas Strip, a Lindt chocolate factory, the list goes on and on… While all the buildings/scenery/actions happening throughout the model areas were extremely impressive, it was the attention to little bits of detail that humored Paul and I the most – if you look closely you can see little hand-made, hand-painted figures doing silly things like wrapping someone in toilet paper at a concert, sitting on the toilet in an outhouse, or falling off their bike in the midst of a race.  Our favourite was a creepy friar/monk standing in the trees checking out a blond babe that was bent over at the trunk of her car getting something.  The only word I can use to describe it all is WOW!!!

Minatur Wunderland is continuously under construction, with work currently being done on an airport that is set to be complete in 2010.  They also plan to add France and Italy afterwards, and I can only imagine what those will look like!  I was so amazed by it all that as soon as we got back to the hotel, I started to look up how I could start to construct my own model railway when I get home.  It looks like Vancouver has a model railing club, but they model on a much smaller scale than Minatur Wunderland and I’m not sure if I would want something smaller scale because I don’t know how you could incorporate the same amount of detail into anything smaller!  Either way, it would take years for me to get everything together, but I am definitely inspired to take up a new hobby when I get home.  I do hope that one day I’ll get to come back to Minatur Wunderland and see more of the completed phases…