Porta-Pottie VS. Formula 1. The Race Is On

The Miniatur Wunderland is touted as the largest model railway system in the world. I’m inclined to believe it. It’s currently running over 1,100 trains. The miniature city around it has a population of 290,000, which is a lot more than I can say for the capital of my state. Hell, it has 52 airplanes taking off and landing.

It’s only 24 years old, but it looks like people have been working on it forever. It’s a big tourist attraction in Hamburg, Germany, and I ever found myself in Hamburg, I’d certainly go see it. It’s got that wonderful vibe of obsession just short of mental illness that I love.

When I was a kid, miniature trains set in a landscape was still quite a thing for my parent’s generation. I saw many abandoned dioramas in various basements with trains in various stages of not working. Our generation loved slot cars, not trains, so grandad or dad couldn’t convince the next generation to keep pinching their fingers while assembling the tracks with those nasty, sharp little pins that aligned them.

Perhaps the concept has been abandoned long enough to get generally popular again, like so many hobbies. It’s slightly silly, but it’s also a lot of fun to look at. And before you even think about mocking the German robo-dweeb trying to get his Formula 1 miniatures to behave on his track, keep in mind that the founders of the Miniatur Wunderland all were awarded the Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. When you’ve got one of those, then you can mock them, and not before.

Too Much Time On Your Hands

If you’ve got too much time on your hands, you could try to see everything at the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany. That’s just looking at it. Building it involves too much time on many, many hands.

Model trains used to be a fairly common hobby. I’ve been in lots of basements with sheets of plywood on sawhorses with trains not currently running around them. They were artifacts of earlier times. Great-grandpa’s trainarama. Grandpa’s train obsession. Mom’s abandoned trainyard after she threw dad out for spending the sugar bowl money on HO scale houses instead of a new roof on the actual house.

Human beings dabble, that’s for sure. Otherwise there wouldn’t be an exercise bike being used as a clothes horse in every bedroom in America. But some people, weird and wonderful, take things all the way to the end of the line. So to speak.