Hans-Peter Porsche Would Rather Play With Toy Trains Than Sports Cars

Ferdinand Porsche fathered both Volkswagen and the sports-car company that bears his name – but he also had two children, and through them, eight grandchildren.

Several of them (like former VW chairman Ferdinand Piëch and current Porsche Holding chairman Wolfgang Porsche) have gone into the family business, but not Hans-Peter Porsche, who seems more interested in model trains.

The third eldest child of Ferry Porsche, Hans-Peter built a museum just to hold his collection of scale trains and other toys in the southeastern German countryside and has opened it to the public.

It's called TraumWerk, and not unlike the specifications of some of his family's automobiles, the numbers are staggering: there are 180 model trains from his private collection chug along, 40 at a time, along 1.7 miles of track laid out on a 4,000-square-foot landscape that towers over 16 feet high, all decorated with 80,000 little trees.

It all started when Hans-Peter, now 77 years old, took his own son to the toy store to buy his first HO-scale Märklin train and ended up taking out a subscription for every single release the prolific manufacturer put out.

The model train set takes up almost 6,000 out of the TraumWerk's 27,000 total square feet of floor space, designed by Berlin architect Volker Staab, who has designed countless other museums. The rest of the facility houses other toy vehicles, but also a handful of full-size cars; mostly Porsches, of course, like his mother's 1966 912, a 959 that needs to be driven every month lest it causes problems, a 904, 356, 914, 944, and a 928. There's a few others from the family's history as well, like a new Volkswagen XL1 and an Austro-Daimler designed by his famous grandfather.

It all seems very impressive, which should come as little surprise given the stock from which he comes. The museum's open from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m, Tuesday through Sunday, in Anger-Aufham, just across the Austrian-German border from Salzburg.