At the beginning of March, I went on a ‘boys weekend’ to Hamburg to celebrate a friend’s birthday. The main focus of the trip was a visit to the Miniatur Wunderland – the world’s largest model railway. We also intended to have a look round the old town and do a boat trip of the docks, which are some of the busiest in Europe, if not the world.

Minitur Wunderland is amazing – simply describing it as a model railway does not do it justice – the attention to detail is amazing, bordering on obsessive. There is just so much to take in, as you can see from some of the photographs. Their website http://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/ has some nice pictures and videos that will give you an idea of what it’s like. We elected to have a ‘behind the scenes’ tour, which was fascinating and allowed us to hear about some of the technologies that they’ve built from scratch and see some things that most people don’t get to see (look for the picture of the nuns sitting on the edge of the world!).

The whole thing is split up into themed areas – Bavaria, Scandinavia, America and so on. There are hundreds of thousands of led lights in the models, so when the light cycles every 15 minutes from daytime to night time, everything lights up – it looks magical! The only downside to the place is that no other model railway will ever look the same!

On the Sunday, we visited the spire of St Nicholas’ Church, which serves as a memorial to the air raids in the second world war. Visitors can ascend the spire in a lift to a viewing platform that gives great views over the city.

We then headed for the port for a boat trip around the docklands. Hamburg’s port is second only to Rotterdam in terms of throughput. The container ships are absolutely vast when you are on the water – remember that each container is effectively the trailer of an articulated lorry.

Hamburg is a fascinating city – we had a great time and we’ll definitely be heading back to Miniatur Wunderland in the future to see what they’ve created next…