As a kid I spent hours in front of shop windows full of toy trains, and now that model railroading is back in the spotlight, I feel right at home. I just watched a TGR Molise report about the group of enthusiasts «Freccia del Molise»: in Baranello they set up miniature trains and railways that drew visitors, adults and children alike, even from outside the region.
What strikes me is the care: every locomotive, every switch, every detail of the landscape is reproduced to scale with obsessive precision. And the best part is that it's not just technique — it's a way to keep the passion for trains alive in a region that, as the report says, suffers from real railway shortcomings.
The association's president and the other model railroaders say it clearly: building a layout takes teamwork, patience and years. But when a child stops, spellbound, in front of a train going round, all the time invested pays off.
It made me want to pull my old layout out of the basement. Maybe this is the right moment to get my hands back on it and, why not, look for a group of enthusiasts near home.
I came across news that the “Miniature Bistro World Exhibition,” a joint show of miniature works centered on food, will be held for the first time at Lalaport Tachikawa-Tachihi. It runs from Tuesday, October 27 to Tuesday, November 3 (a public holiday), and is organized by BACON Co., Ltd.
Forty-eight creators are taking part. Works inspired by bakeries and patisseries will be shown in Tachikawa for the first time, and I am already curious about the textures of the tiny croissants and cakes. A special area themed on world taverns and imaginary restaurants will also be set up.
There will be workshops and limited-edition goods on site. Being able to try making miniatures yourself, not just look at them, is a welcome touch. Admission is 500 yen, and children under three enter free.
What I love about dollhouses and miniature food is that an entire world fits in the palm of your hand. Since it is a rare chance to compare the “little food worlds” of all 48 creators, I think it is worth a visit during the holiday if you live nearby. Please check the official site for the detailed schedule.
For its 25th anniversary, Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg has come up with something special. After a colourful S-Bahn train, a lorry and a named ICE, a brightly designed freight locomotive now runs on real European rail lines. It arrived in Hamburg on 10 August 2026.
The locomotive is a Bombardier TRAXX F140 AC2 of class 185.2, with operating number 185 666, and belongs to the operator Lokomotion. It was designed by Lokomotion and the Railcolor design team together with Wunderland. It was freshly wrapped in late July 2026 in Kufstein, Austria, before delivery.
In everyday service it hauls ordinary freight trains and links cities including Munich, Cologne, Bremen and Hamburg. Its main territory is the Alpine corridor over the Brenner axis, and it covers around 180,000 kilometres a year. Founder Gerrit Braun formally sent it on its way together with the people from Lokomotion, after it had travelled through Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to the Billwerder terminal.
What I like most is that this one-of-a-kind locomotive exists not only in real life but also as a 1:87 scale model on the Wunderland layout. The real engine and its miniature complement each other, and railway fans can now keep an eye out for this rare sight on the routes between Germany and Austria.
Simon Laveuve builds 1/35-scale miniature dwellings that sit on stilts and boulders, and Colossal's Kate Mothes has written about his latest series.
The scenes are filled with small details: tiny chairs, produce crates, fishing gear, and salvaged objects reused as tools and furniture. No people appear anywhere, but the signs of daily life make it feel as if the residents have just stepped away. The pieces are about homes built in unlikely, precarious places by people who make do with what they have, and the article reads them as a metaphor for living through political and economic upheaval. Laveuve told Colossal that the work addresses the basic need to find a place to hold on and to live from there.
Five mixed-media works from 2026 are listed, with titles such as Eau-delà Du Gouffre and Demain Sera Comme Hier. His solo exhibition Ancré dans la roche (Anchored in Rock) runs at Loo & Lou Gallery in Paris from November 12 through December 22, and the gallery will also show his work during Luxembourg Art Week, November 20 to 22.
What I like here is that the miniature is not just cute. The tiny objects carry a whole story about shelter and survival, which is something this hobby does best.
Eri Sutriadji is 72 years old, yet his hands are still nimble as he works with pieces of PVC pipe, wood, files and sandpaper. On the porch of the house he inherited from his parents in the Tebet area of South Jakarta, the man everyone calls Eric spends much of his time creating. There are no large production machines. Just PVC pipe, wood, wire and fiberglass, slowly turning into replicas of motorbikes, detailed down to the smallest parts.
He makes Harley-Davidsons more than anything else, and the reason is deeply personal. Eric’s father was a soldier who was once assigned a 1942 Harley-Davidson WLA for escort duty. That motorcycle has long since disappeared, but its shape never left Eric’s memory. He wanted to bring it back to life in a small size.
He began in the 1990s, while still running a small grocery stall. When business was slow, he took materials and cut, shaped, filed and assembled miniature parts. People around him were puzzled because he kept switching between different projects. He set aside 10,000 rupiah from his daily sales to buy materials and tools.
To me, this story shows that a miniature hobby does not always need expensive materials. With secondhand items and perseverance, childhood memories can be held again.
The Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg has built the "Panik-Express" together with Udo Lindenberg, a model train set at 1:87 (H0) scale that tells the story of his life as a journey through time. According to the press release, it is the most elaborate train the Wunderland has built so far. Lindenberg opened it in person on 24 March 2026. Since then it has run through the Hamburg section of the layout, and at Dammtor station you can hear a piece of "Sonderzug nach Pankow".
The train consists of one locomotive and eight carriages, and each carriage is a small stage showing one phase of life. The locomotive takes up his artwork "Menschenfamilie 1", and his glasses and hat were 3D-printed to scale. The 1950s carriage shows Gronau in black and white, with only his first drum kit in colour. It is followed by the US base Wheelus in Libya, then shortly after the pub "Onkel Pö's Carnegie Hall" in Hamburg-Eppendorf and the concert in the Palast der Republik in 1983.
The 1990s carriage is split into a Reichsbahn half and a Bundesbahn half, with a stage in front of a fallen wall. The 2000s are themed "Phönix aus der Flasche", and the 2010s are designed as a zeppelin showing the MTV Unplugged concert with Clueso. The finale is the hit "Komet" with Apache 207, on a blue comet tail. Even Erich Honecker appears in one compartment, with a guitar.
What I like is that contemporary history is told in miniature. In a few centimetres of carriage length there are allusions you only notice on a closer look. Frederik Braun calls it probably the most elaborate train in the house, and Udo Lindenberg speaks of a great honour.
Colossal featured the miniature dioramas of artist Derrick Lin in a June 2026 article by Kate Mothes. Lin stages and photographs scenes with hand-painted figures in nostalgic settings: a figure boarding an ocean liner, a woman waiting for a tram, a man in a fedora on historic steps, a man on the phone in an airport, and a man hiking with a dog.
What caught my eye is how he plays with scale. Oversized objects such as a giant pencil or a huge coffee mug appear in the scenes and flip the viewer's sense of size. The sets are built from cardboard and found objects: rooftops that look like milk cartons, books standing on end as architecture and steps, a river covered in blossoms. Lin has worked this way since 2013, building the sets on his desk and lighting them cinematically.
His figures often face away from the camera, which pulls the viewer into their inner world. The themes the article names are urban stress and loneliness, the wonder of travel, the passing of time and grief. Lin says he believes the thoughts and feelings we keep to ourselves are what truly shape us, and that his figures are a manifestation of those quiet thoughts.
The piece does not give a scale for the models, but the effect does not depend on it. It is a nice example of how miniatures can carry emotion rather than just detail, and of how everyday materials can become a whole city. Lin shares more of his work on Instagram under the handle marsder.
German photographer Frank Kunert has been building and photographing miniature architectural sets since the 1990s, and designboom just published a nice profile of his work. I found it a lovely reminder that a dollhouse-scale scene can be a whole story.
His sets range from roughly 1:12 to 1:43 scale and are handmade, mostly from lightweight foam board. Each one gets floors, windows, furniture, painted surfaces and shingled roofs before Kunert lights and photographs it. The trick is that ordinary buildings have exactly one design decision that is slightly wrong: a running track that curves around a stadium while one lane drops into a staircase underground, a narrow apartment wedged beneath a highway overpass, or a hotel whose guests reach their rooms by ladders fixed to the outside wall.
Kunert trained as a photographer and began with landscapes before moving into studio miniatures. His early sets included clay figures, but he removed them as the architecture became more realistic, leaving something like an abandoned glass to suggest that someone was just there. He treats the scenes as stage sets where viewers can project their own thoughts, and scale lets him bend rules that a full-size building would have to obey.
His process is slow. Ideas can sit in a sketchbook for months or years, and he sometimes starts building before the final composition is settled. He pays special attention to aged surfaces, which make the scene feel believable before the oddity registers. Underneath the humor there is often a darker edge about human hopes, failures and makeshift solutions. Titles mentioned include "Underpass", "Balconia" and "A Room with a View". His website is frank-kunert.de.
If you love dollhouses and small-scale worlds, mark the date: Sunday 11 October 2026, from 10am to 6pm, the Salon de la miniature et du modèle réduit takes place in Combs-la-Ville, in Seine-et-Marne, at the André Malraux village hall.
The show has been run every year since 2015 by the Club de la maison miniature, which is run entirely by volunteers. The event listing mentions around fifty exhibitors from all over France, as well as from Belgium, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy. They show and sell their work: dollhouses, display cabinets, shops, model trains and boats, and pieces in textile, pottery and wood.
The scales range from 1/12 to 1/144, which gives a sense of the variety: you can go from dollhouse furniture to the smallest dioramas. The organisers expect about 400 visitors. The listing does not go into any activities beyond the exhibition and sale, and it does not give ticket prices, so it is best to check with the organiser before you travel.
What I like about this kind of event is that it brings together enthusiasts from several countries around a shared love of detail. For anyone new to miniatures, it is also a good chance to see the scales with your own eyes and to talk directly with the people who make these tiny pieces.
I love the story of Trần Vũ Trường (31) and Võ Thị Nha (28), who live in Nguyễn Việt Khái commune in Cà Mau province. The couple build miniature houses of the Mekong Delta from old photos or from their customers' memories.
In 2022, while working as factory workers in Đồng Nai, Trường saw miniature houses on social media and tried to make one himself, using cardboard, toothpicks and glue right in his rented room. He had once been in charge of print colours at a packaging company, so he was quite good at mixing paint. After about six months of teaching himself, he started taking orders. In the middle of 2025 the two of them quit their jobs, went home and set up a small workshop next to the house, so they could be close to their parents and children.
The models are made entirely by hand from wooden sticks, bamboo chopsticks, cardboard, Formex board and even beer cans. Popular sizes are 40x50 cm, 60x60 cm and 80x80 cm, priced from a few hundred thousand dong up to more than 40 million dong. A simple house takes about one or two weeks, while a complicated structure can take several months.
One order moved me deeply: a customer in Đồng Tháp wanted to give his grandfather a model of the thatched house where his great-grandfather had once lived, but he had only one blurry photo. Trường and the customer talked for two months, adjusting every pillar and every leaf of the roof. The workshop now brings in about 30 to 40 million dong a month. To me, these tiny houses keep alive a part of memory that no longer exists in real life.
On 16 August 2001 the Miniatur Wunderland opened its doors in an old warehouse in Hamburg. At the time only 300 of the 544 square metres were finished. Now the layout is celebrating its 25th birthday, and the figures in the press release impressed me quite a lot.
Today the Wunderland covers 1,694 square metres, the track is 16,491 metres long, and 1,231 trains with more than 12,000 carriages are running. At the opening, the founders Frederik and Gerrit Braun still spoke of 500 trains on 5,000 metres of track as the final expansion, and they expected 100,000 visitors a year. In March 2025 the 25-millionth visitor was welcomed, and around 1.6 million guests are expected for 2026. The German National Tourist Board also named the attraction the most popular sight among overseas visitors to Germany for the sixth time.
The chronicle reads like a guidebook in miniature: Hamburg, America, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Knuffingen airport with 52 aircraft types, the miniature Elbphilharmonie, Italy, Rio de Janeiro, Patagonia and Monaco. For the future, Sebastian Drechsler mentions a new cinema film, the last sections of the South America area, and preparations for an Asia section.
The most beautiful part for me is the anniversary night with 600 guests: 100 places went to people who could not afford the entry fee, and almost 500 applications came in. The last 80 tickets were auctioned, and together with that came 3,000 euros for the association Kleine Wunder e.V. There is evidently a lot of heart behind so much model building.
