Sonneberg is a town in Thuringia, Germany, which is the seat of the Sonneberg district.
It is renowned as a center of toy production and was dubbed the "toy capital of the world" in the 1920s; during this time, US trade giants Kresge and Woolworth built large warehouses here for exportation. It is the home of the German Toy Museum and PIKO, a model railway manufacturer which became one of the few such enterprises in the Warsaw Pact countries and as such supplied model trains depicting railway stock of all the Soviet bloc countries.
In divided post-war Germany, Sonneberg found itself within the borders of East Germany, cut off from its large neighbouring town of Coburg, Bavaria in West Germany and could only face north economically. It was served by an unnaturally winding railway route and thus became somewhat isolated from the rest of East Germany. Sonneberg Hauptbahnhof is served by the Coburg–Sonneberg line.