Miniature Wunderland Train Display

The "Miniature Wunderland" is the world's largest train set.  As of the summer of 2010, the area it covered measured 1,300 sq. meters or 14,000 sq. ft.

The Miniature Wunderland features almost eight miles of track and is still not complete, the expected finished date is sometime in 2020.  At completion the train set would cover more than 2,300 sq. meters or 24,757 sq. ft. with almost 13 miles of track.

Twin brothers, Frederick and Gerrit Braun, 41, began work on the Miniature Wunderland in 2000.

The set covers six regions including America, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Germany, and the Austrian Alps.

The American section features giant models of the Rocky Mountains, Everglades, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas with more than 30,000 lights, Miami, Area 51, Cape Canaveral and so on.

The Scandinavian part features Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland with real water, the Northern Lights, high & low tides, Arctic Sea, moose, navigating ships and snow.

The Miniature Wunderland consists of 930 trains with more than 14,450 carriages and wagons, the longest train being 14.51 meters or 46 ft.

The scenery includes 228,000 trees, 1270 signals, 3660 buildings, 8850 cars - many with illuminated headlights.

There are 215,000 individually designed figures.

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 control center.

All total, as of the summer of 2010, the set has taken 580,000 hours and more than 12 million euros or 15.6 million dollars to put together, the vast majority of which has come from ticket sales, totaling almost 1 million visitors each year.

Source: Miniature Wunderland

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