Case Study: Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg achieves reliable, scalable operation of the world’s largest model railway with Embarcadero Technologies' Delphi

Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg - Customer Case Study

Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is the world’s largest model railway and a top tourist attraction, drawing about 1.3 million visitors to a 1.5‑acre miniature world with over 1,000 trains, 385,000 lights and hundreds of thousands of animated figures. The technical challenge is keeping all subsystems—trains, vehicles, lights, airport displays, climate and ticketing systems—synchronized and running virtually continuously (up to 20 hours a day, 365 days a year) with minimal downtime.

The solution is a Delphi‑based software landscape of roughly three‑quarters of a million lines of code: vehicle and light control, a Delphi version of the Railware train system, and a central command distributor (“The Brain”) that synchronizes time and recovers from failures, all on a decentralized IT backbone. The result is a flexible, scalable, and highly reliable operation that delivers realistic traffic and lighting scenes, collision‑free train scheduling, minimal interruptions, and the ability to evolve the system over time.

Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg

Daniel Wolf

Software Developer