FREMO

We introduce ourselves - Goals of the Club

The FREMO (Freundeskreis Europäischer Modellbahner = Friendship Association of European Model Railroaders) was founded in 1981 and has now about 600 members in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Italy, Poland, Finland, Greece, Spain and the Tchechz Republik.

All three parts of the name are important to us:
FReundeskreis / Circle of Friends - we meet not only at our official meetings, but we stay in contact with each other personally, by e-mail or via the phone
Europäischer - although incorporated in Germany, our memberlist underlines our engagement for a Europe without frontiers.
MOdellbahner / MOdellrailroaders - we would like to see ourselve as the creative avantgarde of the hobby in Europe - articles written by our members appear in several magazins and books - we promote the use of smaller rails and many ideas, which surfaced to a wider audiance in the last years, were developed and tested at FREMO-meetings.

According to its charter it has established the folling goals and activities:
"The goal of the club is to promote the hobby of modelrailroading, in particular its creative and active aspects, as well as the personal contacts between modelrailroaders on a interregional and international level.

This goal should be promoted via the following activities:

• Organisation of interregional meetings of active modelrailroaders with the following main targets:
  • Presentation and appraisal of the personal creativity of individual members or groups.
  • Practical presentation of model building technics.
  • Visit of members layouts
• Preparation of standards for modules, which are transportable units which form together a complete, operational layout, in such a way that members can build their personal modules according to their own intentions.
• Editing of a members magazine (HP1 Modellbahn)with the following departments:
  1. Tested how-to articles
  2. Articles about good layouts (with preferance to operation).
  3. Realistic operation on model layouts.
  4. readers discussions
• Recommendations for essential model measurements and standards to increase the reliability, the scale appearance and the interchangeablity."

(Source: Charter of the FREMO dated 31.5.1985, § 3.1-3.2)

The best known part of our activities is the building and operation of modules. But not all members do build modules, some collect, rebuilt and weather freight cars according to prototype, others build locomotives. Most of the activists want to be exact as possible during building and operation.