[mykehunt]

For anyone even remotely interested in model trains I highly suggest checking out their YouTube channel if not a trip to Hamburg to see it in person.

I had the fortune to visit The Miniature Wunderland back in 2014. Spent a good day and a half there. The behind the scenes tour was great. Particularly how they handled the airplanes after landing and their system for charging the hundreds of trucks and automobiles on the layout.

The planning behind things is really incredible. One example each mainline has two trains. One running and one on a siding. This is because the motors of the engines can over heat. In the staging area every 24 inches or so they had a separate smoke detector. At the time they had around 300 full time employees and they have grown a good deal since.

Link to two of their Monaco Videos https://youtu.be/CqT0u6QDJtg?si=rkDysgDH_4USflmN

https://youtu.be/EwLr4LOgi_U?si=oK9Lij3-PUmDkHNp

My N-scale office layout in 2011 pales in comparison. https://youtu.be/DBJIwmpYzY4?si=DRgr6O-7CZUJm-gs

Ironically I ended my tour of Europe at the Monaco Grand Prix. (Thank you Starwood points.)

[netsharc]

From all the YouTube videos, I learnt they started in 2001 (middle of August, about 4 weeks before 9/11, where for a few days afterwards very few people showed up), and their "Car-System" (which drives the cars, and even planes) is written in Pascal. For the F1 races, Gerrit (the boss who had the dream of having these races) said he wanted a real software-driven race, and thought, "Wait a minute, we have 20 cars, nowadays CPUs have more cores than that, so just give each car a core of the CPU".

In some videos you see glimpses of computer screens that control the cars, the UI looks very fascinating (lots of checkboxes, and status lines).