Visit the World’s Largest Model Railroad in Street View | Hacker News Reader

Visit the World’s Largest Model Railroad in Street View

techcrunch.com

25 pointsmstolpm12 comments

Worth a visit if you are in Hamburg!

The control room: https://goo.gl/maps/PqBmK9vjX1G2

I totally loved this place. I could have stayed the entire day if the rest of my family would have let me.

If you swivel 180 degrees, note the locker with the multi-colored doors. Inside each door is a charging cable for a type of camera or smartphone. You can stand there and get a quick refill of your device, or put €1 in the slot and leave it for a while.

It's the neatest thing I've ever seen in a tourist attraction. Haven't seen it much of anywhere else.

This is exactly why I travel alone.

Well, my son asked to go because he wanted to see the new airport addition (and it's insanely cool). I'm the one that had to be dragged out at the end because I get way into the mechanics of the attraction.

Oh, I just mean that the reason I travel alone is so that I have complete freedom to spend all day in a place like that.

At least some people think there's even a business in _free_ charging stations: http://www.chargebox.com.

If you get a chance to visit a giant miniature railway like this, do so. They are marvelously complicated pieces of machinery combined with hand crafted works of art to build the city and scenery on top.

And if you get a chance to peek in the control room to see what makes these things tick, take it. I took a peek to a control room of a much smaller railway set than the one in the article and it was impressive. About a few dozen monitors that display the entire track network and every train and vehicle on the tracks.

The railway I visited was in Berlin, on the top floor of a mall in Alexanderplatz. It's the biggest miniature railway I've ever seen, but it's smaller than the one in the article.

"We’re talking 13,000 kilometers of track [...] across a layout that’s now takes up almost 14,000 square feet."

That would be half a mile of track on each square feet; even 13 kilometer seems crowded to me.

Looking at their site, I learn it is 13 km on (1,300 square meters (14,000 square feet) plus lots of interconnections between the sections; a lot of that track is out of sight.

And by the way, their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/MiWuLaTV) is worth watching, in particular Gerrit's Tagebuch (diary) (edit: videos are German spoken)

Anyone near Hamburg able to do this with Mapillary [1]?

[1] https://www.mapillary.com/

This is awesome! Especially that they spent time developing tiny street view cameras.

But why can't I move around? :-(

They didn't blur faces and addresses! This must be in violation of some Privatrecht!

Should've rendered a sky as background :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com