Where Gumbo Was #295
People often think of model railroads and the like as ‘toys for boys,’ but our visit to Hamburg’s Miniatur-Wunderland told us otherwise: the immense and incredible miniature world was crowded with enthusiasts of all ages and genders.
And, it’s a lot more than a model railroad display; ‘miniature world’ is more like it, with ten major chunks of the world already built and six more to come over the next few years. The model scale is the same throughout the immense space, but the level of modeling ranges from meticulous to freehand, from precise to playful—sometimes next to each other! For clues, I tried to use the most realistic-looking ones, but George G and Professor Abe weren’t fooled!
Hamburg’s Dammtor station took three months of building, using both kit parts such as windows and custom-made sections.
It’s housed on three floors of a 19th-century brick warehouse in Hamburg’s Speicherstadt (Warehouse City) district, above another ‘attraction,’ the Hamburg Dungeon. Every city seems to need to prove it’s a real city by having at least one fake dungeon and one fake Irish bar. It’s an area of the city that’s rapidly becoming an upscale retail and housing area, recycling the sturdy building stock.
Wunderland is not especially small: over 10 miles of HO-gauge track spread over 73,000 feet of floor space, with more than 1,300 trains made up of over 10,000 cars. There are 100,000 other moving vehicles, 50,000 lights, 130,000 trees, 400,000 people, and one flying saucer. And the airport, where scale model planes ‘fly’ off the runway on wires and into a canvas sky.
Two brothers, Frederik and Gerrit Braun founded Wunderland in 2000; in addition to the 400,000 ‘model citizens,’ it has 270 full-size actual people working, either in customer areas or building new models, or, like these two, running the whole world from an elaborate control center that not only manages the moving parts, but also changes day to night and night to day. in Wunderland, where even time is scale-model.
The original sections, when it opened in 2001 were Harz, which represents Central Germany; the fictional town of Knuffingen and Austria. Later additions include Hamburg, the U.S., Scandinavia and Switzerland. The airport was added in 2011, followed by Italy and Venice within the past two years.
At twilight time, not only does the overall lighting change, but headlights and window lights turn on all over the layout.
Plans are underway for Monaco, with a Formula One circuit; England and Scotland, France, Ireland and Wales, the Benelux countries and Sydney, Australia. All should be finished by 2028—but who knows if that will really be the end?
Accidents, incidents, demonstrations and even a miniature funeral. It’s almost a game to spot the minor ones here and there, but some have user-operated buttons to set effects in motion.
Miniature golf, a funfair, an outdoor concert and even a huge soccer statium are there for your amusement; for a donation to good causes, you can place a spectator in a stadium seat!
If you’re planning a visit, don’t think of it as a quick one. In nearly five hours there, we didn’t exhaust the possibilities, although we nearly exhausted ourselves. Fortunately, it’s possible to take a break for lunch or a snack; there is a quite reasonably-priced cafeteria with decent food…and seats modeled on a railroad dining car.
Not all city lowland scenery, of course; these Alpine lodges have a place, too. The upper one is on Mt. Sankt-Pauli; fans of the local Sankt-Pauli football club raised funds for the naming rights, with the money going to relief work after the earthquake in Haiti. At the summit, there’s a tiny figure in an SP jersey.
Building and repair take place constantly; there’s even a section on one floor where you can see design and planning work for future sections. And the occasional view across the models to human presence serves as a reminder of scale.
Photographing models so that they look real is an art I’ve barely begun to learn; finding the best fool-ya pictures for the Where in the World clues wasn’t easy! But note one oddity in the next two pictures: the one that’s slightly out of focus looks less like a model than the one that’s sharp!
Hamburg has recently opened a new music hall, the Elbephilharmonie, a massive glass structure atop a former warehouse. The building contains apartments, offices, a beautiful concert hall and storage. The model at Wunderland opens wide to reveal the interior layout.
Hamburg is a major port, so ships get a shake, too, although some of the best waterfront sections are located in ‘Scandinavia.’
And, finally, after passing a major industrial area, we come to the airport, busy with jetliners, including the Concorde seen near the top, from all over…and a few that are not jetliners, such as the DC6 below. There’s also a Lockheed Constellation in the fleet, my favorite.
Night scenes at the airport section were especially impressive; the dim light seemed realistic, and lent a ‘real’ appearance to the planes and the field.
The planes take turns taxiing around the runways, and ‘taking off’ by wire, then sailing through a sky-painted canvas, only to return minutes later to land from the other side of the room. Most were meticulous scale models of actual planes, but take this one as a reminder that, after all, Miniature-Wunderland is for fun!
