St. Petersburg is famous as the city of museums among locals and Russians because it has a lot of museums inside the city and around its suburb area. While most of these museums are world-renowned, there are still several museums in St. Petersburg that have remained hidden from view by most tourists. One of the main reasons that some of the museums are not as popular as others is the location of these museums, for instance, the Grand Maket Rossiya Museum locates outside of the city center, and with multiple major attractions around the city center and in the suburb area, most tourists prefer not to visit this museum on their trip to St. Petersburg. We at the Star Travel Group would suggest Grand Maket Rossiya to our travelers if they’ve got enough time during their tour to St. Petersburg because the museum would surprise its visitors.
Grand Maket Rossiya is a private interactive museum in St. Petersburg that represents multiple representations of everyday life in the Russian Federation. The whole two-story museum is a miniature display of various areas of Russia, and it’s the second-largest model in the world following the Miniature Wonderland in Hamburg, Germany. One of the remarkable things about this museum is that it required five years and more than a hundred people to be completed. The museum allowed its first visitors to enter the “Grand Maket” in April 2011, and for the next 14 months after that, it remained on the test mode and only received visitors on the weekends.
It has said that if anyone wants to travel around Russia in less than an hour, they should visit the Grand Maket Rossiya because it portrays different regions inside the Russian Federation. Visitors would see Russian people's everyday life and various human activities, such as sport, work, military service, leisure, travel, etc. it also displays Russian most excellent natural attractions, small towns, large cities, and top tourist attractions around Russia. The model also features buses, trains, cars, agriculture, military machinery, construction, and even the grand Trans-Siberian railway. Since this is an interactive museum, visitors can control some parts of the plan with interactive buttons that have placed around the layout.
Multiple things make this museum exceptional besides the educational and entertainment parts, such as the day/night system. The lightning of the model changes every 13 minutes as day turns to night, and the night lightning lasts for two minutes. The specialists have used more than 500 thousand LED lights to mimic the day and night lighting without creating shadows, which is quite remarkable on this scale.
Every action on this model is designed in the most realistic way possible for a miniature model. All the cars and busses use blinking signals, stop at red lights, change speeds, and move like a real vehicle. The engineers of this project used wireless charging to supply power for the moving vehicles.
One of the lovely treats from this miniature model of Russia is for the train fans, which includes the well-known Trans-Siberian railway. The railway system took 2.5 kilometers of rail, more than 450 switch boxes, and about 250 trains. If you love locomotive models and railway designs, the Grand Maket Rossiya is the place that you should visit on your travel to St. Petersburg.
Although Grand Maket Rossiya Museum is one of the most fascinating museums in St. Petersburg, it is of little interest to foreign tourists, and the reason is that there are so many major tourist attractions in St. Petersburg and its suburbs, that tourists prefer to spend their time in St. Petersburg to visit the major ones. The visitors to this museum would see various models of naval bases, spaceport, factories, military bases, agriculture fields, historical buildings, plants, cars, trains, animals, and people.
We at the Star Travel Group recommend our travelers to check out our weblog, to find more about the top attractions of Russia and places that they should visit. They can also find several useful tips and pieces of advice about the trip to Russia in the posts, such as “Attractive Places of Russia” under the section of ‘Travel to Russia’ on our website.
