2010 Trip: Hamburg Day 2
4th June 2010
Today it was back into town, to the famous fish market. It happened to be a Friday rather than a Sunday, so nothing was happening (I was well aware of this!), but I peered into the windows and looked out over the river.
I then headed along the waterfront to the U-434, an Soviet submarine, decommissioned after the Cold War. It is open for visitors and so I took a, well, clamber inside. I’m not really sure what I expected, in some ways smaller, in ways bigger. This thing housed 80+ people and had beds for only a third of those; it is loud, cramped, ingenious, claustrophobic, and very cool. Three engines, that could alternate between diesel and electric, bilge pump systems, missile systems etc.
I always imagined that if anywhere on a submarine was spacious, it would be the bridge, but this is the smallest operational area of the ship (with the most staff). Much of the control is distributed throughout the ship requiring tight communication between the different departments. It was also odd to see things like water tight hatchways to seal off different areas of the ship, the prerequisite galley, and a shower. Pipes and cables extrude everywhere, as if the designers thought that the more of the ship they could show is actually doing stuff, the better it will look for them - typical Soviets. All in all, very cool.
After this, I headed north to Altona to meet up with an old school friend - Kat, who is currently studying in Hamburg. We took lunch and chatted over excessive plates of pasta and salad. We then headed down to the waterfront, where I had been yesterday - our goal: to visit Minatur Wunderland, which neither of us had seen. I had booked us tickets a few days before to avoid the queues.
We got out onto the packed floor of the exhibit and spent the next few hours looking around the largest model railway in the world. Now under construction for eight years, it has five years to go until all of the planned sections (representing different areas of the globe - Hamburg, Switzerland, USA, Scandanavia etc) are complete. To give you an idea of scale, there are currently 12km of track (20km when complete), running 830+ trains (1,300), illuminated by over 300k LEDs (500k).
So far there has been an estimated 500,000 person hours into the construction of the project. So yeah, we are talking pretty big! When you get things on this scale (pun intended), you can start playing around with cool stuff. For example, the entire system is built around a night-day system that takes about 15 minutes to go through one cycle. Coloured fluorescent tubes model the gradual change from day to night and then back in the morning. As night falls, lights come on in a realistic fashion; homes, trains, street lights and vehicles are all illuminated as appropriate. They even have a section representing Las Vegas, which looks incredible at night.
They have also designed a system in which a large number of cars in the system are also controllable. A model mine, a harbour, a rock concert, a stadium, really cool systems to move trains across different levels and under the floor, and all the quirky things it is possible to imagine people doing. Trust the Germans! But yeah, totally awesome!
After this, Kat and I walked back along the waterfront and visited an old tunnel (opened in 1911) that runs under the Elbe. On either side of the river, shafts were sunk to below the water level and then a tunnel dug between. Rather than being able to drive down into the tunnel, cars have to take the lift down at one end, drive through, and then take the lift up at the other end. It is still in use! Very cool and atmospheric!
After walking back to Altona with Kat, we said goodbye and I headed back to Elaine’s place, via a supermarket. I made wedges and tortilla wraps for dinner. Yum.