By his own admission, the 74-year-old grandson of Volkswagen inventor Ferdinand Porsche still sees the world with a child’s eyes. And as a member of a family clan worth billions, his new toy museum was destined to be a giant among miniature dream worlds.
Replete with vast personal collections of model cars, ships, planes and railways, and covering 23,000 square metres of the Berchtesgaden area of Bavaria, the “Hans-Peter Porsche Traumwerk” (Dream Works) even has a 1.6 kilometre narrow-gauge railway to entertain visitors when the complex opens this Saturday.
“I hope to make children happy with this,” Hans-Peter Porsche says about his dream land, trying to imagine his own reactions if he were a child seeing this for the first time. “I would just gawp in silence,” the German-born industrialist concludes.
The museum’s centrepiece is the HO scale model railway built across 365 square metres of land. It has 2.7 kilometres of track and 180 trains, of which 40 are in motion at any time, buzzing round a finely detailed landscape that dips and rises five metres in relief.
A series of settings replicates the picturesque Lake Constance region and ferry terminal at Friedrichshafen, as well as the Freilassing train station.
In the Austrian part, the Semmering and Tauern railway lines have been minutely copied, while the Swiss area of the diorama hosts the Gotthard railway and Biaschina tunnel. The dioramas have day and night time effects, allowing the illumination of the working Ferris wheel and many other features that were recreated to scale.
But while the Porsche heir could let his imagination run riot in the scope of the design and its bustling scenes, the family name carries an obligation to the motor company’s legacy. A trained engineer, Hans-Peter Porsche is still on the supervisory board, so he also included the Porsche factory in Stuttgart and the design office in Gmuend.
Everything is done to the same standards of perfection he imposed upon himself since he was a child. At the age of 13, he completed his first three-by-two-metre model railway with a landscape he built himself – more than once: “The next day I ripped it all out and re-did it because I was not satisfied.”
But it’s not all about his own fascination. The exhibits also salute fellow enthusiasts and include the working model railway of late Austrian pop singer Peter Alexander, who died in 2011. Porsche purchased the set at auction, appreciative of a level of dedication after his own heart. The entertainer spent hundreds of hours building stations, bridges, viaducts and even a tourist restaurant in his own miniature world.
Other museum rarities came from different eras, like the masses of cars, ships, planes, stuffed toys and dollhouses gathered by Porsche over the years and now exhibited across 3,500 square metres in 150 display cases. “We want to show how much the toy world has changed in recent decades,” says his son Peter Daniell Porsche.
Meanwhile, Hans-Peter has lost none of his passion for collecting. At home he has 230 soft toy bears and 580 ties with bear motifs, and his collection of real Porsche classic cars is also expected to be shown among the museum’s temporary exhibitions.
“The man is crazy,” is probably most people’s appraisal of his interests and hobbies, Porsche says. “But that doesn’t matter, let them say it,” he adds with the assuredness of a model railway devotee who will scarcely be stopped in his tracks.