Apple of discord in small format

Whe wants to go from the future to the past, only has to cross a street. North of the Arnulf-Klett-Platz, which is actually a multi-lane street tube, is Stuttgart’s largest construction site. The elongated entrance building of the main station is barricaded with construction fences, behind which the largest and most expensive excavation pit in the city is gradually filling up: a huge trough in which the underground station for Stuttgart 21 is being built.

Train travelers have to walk around them in a huge arc to get to their tracks. On the way, large-format visualizations promise a completely new city center: A plaza full of eyes of light intended to illuminate the future subway station promises urban flair. Where bundles of tracks fan out today, an entire district is to be created.

controversial project

Not everyone likes that. Stuttgart 21 was and is the most controversial Deutsche Bahn project. But the power of the factual has allowed the protests to come to nothing. And so all that remains on the other side of the street is a nostalgic look at the past. For some from the anti-S-21 movement, a former media market has actually become a place of pilgrimage. There the Bonatz building, as the station building is called after its architect, still has its wings, there eight platform roofs span the 16 tracks, there there are still luggage wagons lined up on the platforms. And next to the passenger station there is an almost equally sprawling network of tracks and points: the freight station.

All that past. It can be seen in the Miniature Worlds in Stuttgart. The name says it all: Based on the trendsetter in Hamburg’s warehouse district, the Miniature Wonderland, which turned a model railway exhibition into a tourist magnet.

In fact, Rainer Braun, the owner of the Stuttgart facility, was also motivated by Hamburg to open the exhibition in Stuttgart in the spring. And indeed, the layout with its up to 260 locomotives, 1000 trains and 500 houses is aimed at everyone who enjoys a model world, families with children as well as model railroaders who admire everything that can be built if you push the limits of a basement room.

Europe’s largest city model

But that’s where the comparison with Hamburg ends. The Stuttgart facility is – more serious. The lights aren’t flashing everywhere, you’re looking in vain for gags, and the trains don’t run that much either, they tend to go in and out of the station.

Above all, the layout is not a potpourri of landscape scenes or individual well-known buildings, but concentrates on the station, its widely ramified track apron and the streets around it. And that with perfect attention to detail: Whether it’s window frames, tombstones in the adjacent cemetery, roof shapes of even the smallest shed and of course the railway facilities themselves – everything is exact, nothing fantasized. Europe’s largest city model is on 180 square meters, on a scale of 1:160: four square kilometers are compressed in reality.

And a complete mystery for Rainer Braun and his team. That’s perhaps the biggest difference to Hamburg: there, a large team built specifically for the public. However, the Stuttgart facility was not intended for the public and was built on its own in the catacombs, so to speak: on a mezzanine floor of an underground S-Bahn station. Wolfgang Frey worked there, on the railway. He had trained as a retail salesman, then went to the railways, was a shunter, conductor, and finally a dispatcher in various signal boxes. At the age of about 18, he began to recreate the Stuttgart train station – and soon came up with the plan to recreate the entire railway network of the city of Stuttgart.

Which clearly could not be accommodated in an apartment. In 1992, Wolfgang Frey got his underground empire, and his workload picked up speed. After his service in the main signal box in Stuttgart, he boarded the S-Bahn, went one station further, opened a steel door there – in order to create an exact image of his working world in his free time after work.