Everything You Need To Know About The World’s Largest Model Airport

While you may have heard about Legoland, have you ever heard of Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany? According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Miniatur Wunderland is home to the world’s largest model railway and model airport. Located in Hamburg’s historic UNESCO award-winning Speicherstadt warehouse district, Miniatur Wunderland is one of Germany’s most popular and visited sights.

Spread across several stories in an old warehouse building, Miniatur Wunderland occupies around 75,347 square feet of floor space, of which

The railway and airport use sixteen thousand six hundred thirty square feet. The Miniatur Wunderland exhibition includes 1,120 digitally controlled trains pulling 10,000 wagons over 52,946 feet of HO-scale track. While the model railway is impressive, the crown jewel of Miniatur Wunderland is its miniature airport modeled after Hamburg Airport (HAM).

Called “Knuffingen Airport” after a fictitious Bavarian town, Miniatur Wunderland’s airport is a working model airport with 52 aircraft moving around just like their real-life counterparts.

What was the inspiration for Miniatur Wunderland?

In the summer of 2000, Frederik Braun was vacationing in Zurich, Switzerland, and by chance stumbled upon a model train store. The encounter instantly brought up childhood memories of the time he and his twin brother Gerrit Braun had spent playing with model trains.

Photo: Miniatur Wunderland 

Later that day, Frederik phoned his twin brother back in Germany and said, “I have just had the greatest idea.” Instantly, Gerrit was onboard, eager to get to work. When speaking to global media company CNN about the project, Gerrit Braun said:

“We had the dream to build a very large model world in childhood, but we forgot this dream when we were 15 or 16 years old – girls, cars, and everything else came into our life.”

As soon as he had picked up the telephone and heard about Frederik’s idea, all those childhood memories came flooding back.

“It took seconds. All the pictures from our childhood – and what we could do today – came into my mind,” he says. “And these pictures were not standing still. It was movement. It was life. Lights turning on and off, trains running, planes moving and flying…”

Photo: Jake Hardiman | Simple Flying

Immediately, the two brothers got to work sketching out their ideas of what Miniatur Wunderland would look like and, within a few months, had signed a lease on a building in Hamburg’s trendy warehouse district. While many saw the brothers as daydreamers telling them that model trains were for old men, the pair persevered and got their friend Stephan Hertz involved as a co-founder.

They needed a model builder and a loan from the bank

Now, with a vision and plan, they needed to hire a skilled model builder. After an extensive Internet search, they narrowed the search down to Gerhard Dauscher, a highly recognized German model maker. Initially, Dauscher turned them down as he was already committed to other work.

Unable to shake the twins’ dream from his mind, two days later, after having been asked, Dauscher telephoned Frederik and said he could not stop thinking about it and would work around his other commitments.

For the vision to succeed, they needed to borrow money from a bank, so they made an appointment with Hamburger Sparkasse AG, a local Hamburg public savings bank. Already expecting the bank to say no, they asked to borrow two million Deutsche Marks, and surprisingly, the bank agreed.

Knuffingen model airport

After completing the railway, the team ambitiously considered adding a model airport. Modeling it on Hamburg Airport (HAM), Gerrit made multiple visits to the airport, taking photos and talking to staff about how everything worked.

When talking about the airport with the CNN model builder, Dauscher said:

“We wanted it to have a real atmosphere of the airport.”

At Knuffingen Airport, planes take off, land, taxi, and park at the gate just like they do at an actual airport. Because the teams at Miniatur Wunderland want to replicate Hamburg Airport (HAM), whenever anything new happens, they are quick to replicate it, even something as mundane as a new taxi rank.

Knuffingen Airport has:

• 62 miles of electric wiring
• 40,000 LED lights, all installed by hand
• 15,000 miniature figures
• 47 aircraft that range in size from Cessna business jets to Airbus A380s
• A fire brigade with 14 emergency vehicles
• Luggage loading vehicles
• Catering trucks
• Airport buses
• Every other type of vehicle and machine you see at Hamburg Airport

Photo: Jake Hardiman | Simple Flying

Knuffingen Airport has 250 takeoffs and landings per day to simulate the aircraft movements and make them appear natural. From a purely technical point of view, Knuffingen Airport is the most fascinating section of Miniatur Wunderland.

Miniatur Wunderland location, opening hours and ticket prices

How to get to Miniatur Wunderland

The Miniatur Wunderland is located in the heart of Hamburg’s Speicherstadt (the historic warehouse district). It can be easily reached by bike, metro, bus, or car. Hamburg bus line 6 has a bus stop directly outside Miniatur Wunderland, and the nearest metro station is Baumwall (U3). The two closest tram stops are Stadthausbrücke (S1 & S3).

In the front of Miniatur Wunderland is a city bike station (StadtRAD-Station) and a parking lot. The exact address of Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg for your GPS device is:

Kehrwieder 2

20457 Hamburg – Speicherstadt

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Miniatur Wunderland opening times

Miniatur Wunderland is open every day, including holidays, from 09:30 to 18:00. It is open much longer on weekends during school vacation time and on German public holidays.

Miniatur Wunderland limits the number of people entering the exhibition to give each guest a better overall understanding of Wunderland and the chance to explore everything in more detail. Because of this, on busy days, you may have to wait in line to get in.

Miniatur Wunderland ticket prices

Children less than three feet tall in the company of an adult enter free of charge.

Children under 16 12.50€

Adults 20.00€

People in wheelchairs 8.00€

Discounted tickets are on sale for 17.50€ if you meet the following requirements:

• Students
• Senior Citizens (from 65 years)
• Assistants of severely disabled persons
• People obtaining unemployment benefits

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