Photo: Flickr, myboeckmann

Just a couple of weeks back on the third of October, Germany celebrated the twentieth year of its reunification; and in November, the coming twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall will be a further occasion for reflection on the German story – and some more celebrations, of course.

For me, however, one of the more interesting anniversaries will be in 2014, when Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s biggest train operator, celebrates its own twentieth birthday.

After all, Deutsche Bahn is in its own way as much of a symbol of German reunification as anything else. After the war, Germany’s huge, well-organised rail-system was split between capitalism and communism, between East and West for forty years. By 1988, Western Germany’s Bundesbahn had developed the TGV-style ICE train, breaking world rail-speed records. Behind the iron curtain, 1988 – somewhat embarrassingly – was the year of the last timetabled trains hauled by steam locomotives.

Now, the two systems are so tightly woven together that it seems hard to believe they were ever divided. So it is for me somehow quite appropriate at this time to visit a slice of very German railway utopia – and I’m not talking about Berlin’s new Hauptbahnhof, Europe’s biggest multi-storey station and already acknowledged as a cathedral of modern rail travel. No, my destination is Miniaturwunderland in Hamburg, where you can take a tour of modern Germany and German culture by rail without even getting on a train.

Photo: Flickr, mueritz

Starting off a few years back with 300m², the world’s largest model railway layout now runs on 1150m² – and, from what I hear, founder Frederik Braun is still not satisfied. There’s something very German about that – Germans like big projects and always aim to stay one step ahead. Having said that, it’s not like Miniaturwunderland has much competition; I for one have simply never heard of anything similar on this scale before.

To give you an idea of what “the world’s largest model railway” and “1150m²” mean, imagine an old multi-storey Victorian warehouse built for storing sacks of coffee beans or towering piles of carpets: then imagine one whole floor of this warehouse being covered in a model railway. Each of the six or seven rooms through which it runs can hold 20-30 visitors. There are mini high-speed lines running straight over ten metres; there are stations with 10 to 12 platforms broader than your average weight-lifter; in the Switzerland annex, there are mountains that are taller than me (and I’m a good 6”2 with shoes on).

It’s not just the size, though. There’s also something very German about the thoroughness, the attention to detail that pervades these 1150m². There are all sorts of little eccentricities, of which every visitor has their favourite: there’s the building that’s on fire, for example, or the fairground where visitors can operate the big-wheel and other rides at the touch of the button. Or there are the somewhat outlandish mine-trolls slaving away under the layout’s mountainous regions and the crashed UFO flashing away discretely in its crater.

Photo: Flickr, zanthia

My own favourite detail, and one symptomatic of yet another very German characteristic – namely an open and frank attitude to sex – is a young couple getting somewhat, ahem, carried away in a sunflower field. Also somewhat… “revealing” is the street techno-party in mini-Hamburg, with a good couple of hundred figures dressed to impressed and dancing like crazy under the raised subway tracks.

For those who find this aspect of German culture too shocking, there are more harmless examples: the HSV football stadium in miniature, for example, with its roaring crowds and small big-screen; or the day-trippers fishing in streams and going on hikes; or goods trains with common German brands trundling all over this country in miniature.

What else can Miniaturwunderland tell us about Germany twenty years after reunification? For a start, it can tell us that there’s more Europe’s industrial powerhouse than just car-factories. On the other hand, it also speaks volumes about the enduring German love of technology and gadgets, of engineering and construction. It is also perfect proof – if any were still needed by anyone – that Germans have a love of the whimsical and essentially pointless and a genuinely ingenious sense of humour; then again, like of lot of German humour, Miniaturwunderland’s truly hilarious and slightly crazy side only reveals itself at a second glance.

Finally – and most importantly for me – it reminds us that Germany would simply not be Germany without the railway.

Brian’s German-language video-blog “Lost in Deutschland” recently featured an episode about Miniaturwunderland.