See the Grand Canyon in Miniature in Hamburg, Germany

Miniatur Wunderland—an extremely popular attraction inside a large building in an historic region of Hamburg, Germany—is an amazingly detailed model railway with more than 50,000 feet of track spread over an area of about 14,000 square feet. Hundreds of model trains travel through miniature landscapes depicting scenery from all around the world, including the U.S. sites of the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, the Everglades, Mount Rushmore, the Las Vegas Strip, and Cape Canaveral, as well as Hamburg’s Hagenbecks Zoo and St. Michaels Church, Bavaria’s Neuschwanstein Castel, a fully-functioning airport, an Oktoberfest celebration filled with people, the Alps, the Arctic Sea, and many other famous sites.

In 2015, Google fastened its 360-degree cameras to the small trains—small versions of the same kinds of cameras that Google has long used to capture interactive panoramic views of real places throughout the world. The tiny versions of the cameras captured 360-degree images of Miniatur Wunderland, giving people the same perspective they would get if they could shrink down in size to ride on the miniature trains.

The results are a spectacular combination of detailed reality and imaginative fantasy. They can be seen at: http://www.google.com/maps/streetview/#miniatur-wunderland.