This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published July 06, 2009 and can be found here.
I hope you like model trains. Because if you don't, you're about to get an eyeful. This is simply unbelievable. The Miniature Wunderland model railroad in Hamburg, Germany is the largest in the world, covering 16,146 square feet of space with more than 10,000 train cars running around its 6.8 MILES of HO scale track! Now that's large, but it's not even the size of this plastic micro-world that's most impressive--it's all in the details. See for yourself...
Construction began in 2000, and is still underway with a tiny airport due for completion by the end of this year. 160 artists have already invested over 500,000 working hours in the project, which has been visited by more than 5 million flabbergasted tourists.
And this is just the beginning - there are plans to double to layout by 2014. We especially like the Las Vegas portion, complete with dazzling LEDs lighting up the night (there are over 300,000 LED lights in all). But Switzerland is pretty darn cool too. Go ahead, take a ride thru the Alps--I'll wait for you...
With 800 trains, 10,000 railroad cars, and 200,000 tiny inhabitants, there's good reason why this is Germany's most popular attraction. Visit www.miniatur-wunderland.com for more pics and video.
