[7] Back in Hamburg, he searched for email addresses online and started a survey on the popularity of real and fictional sights of the city.

[clarification needed] According to Braun and his twin brother Gerrit, the initial idea and business plan for Miniatur Wunderland fit on just two pages.

[11] The 190 m2 (2,000 sq ft) Bella Italia section was opened on 28 September 2016 after four years under construction, involving 180,000 man hours and costing around €4 million.

[27] Intricate details include a changing scoreboard in the Volkspark Stadium, speeding cameras and a crashed cheese wheel truck.

There is also a Jet gas station displaying the real current gasoline prices of its prototype in Hamburg's Amsinck street.

[28] Visitors can control operations on the system through about 200 push-buttons, including options to start a mine train, turn wind turbines, trigger a goal in the football stadium, launch a helicopter or the Space Shuttle, or elongate Pinocchio's nose.

[30] After six years in planning and under construction, Knuffingen airport was officially opened to visitors on 4 May 2011 as a special section of the facility.

On the 14-meter (46 ft) runway, aircraft models accelerate to scale on an invisible sled, and by means of two guide rods can lift off the ground and disappear into a wall.

There is also a Concorde in British Airways livery, a Space Shuttle, a bee and a model of the Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars.

The vehicles in the airport tell their own little stories with coordinated refueling, loading and unloading before and after landing starting from the aircraft parking positions.

The area is equipped not only with many rolling aircraft models, but also with hundreds of cars, passenger boarding bridges, parking garages, airport hotels, a subway and individual figures.

[34] The Miniatur Wunderland also holds the Guinness World Record for "longest melody played by a model train.

[10] In 2015, together with singer Helene Fischer, a campaign for Ein Herz für Kinder was launched in which over 450,000 euros (as of 01/2016) were collected.