New German Z Scale Club and Forum

Hello,
as some of you have already noticed, there are major changes going on in the German Z scale community.
At the end of last year, a couple of Z scalers left the Z Friends Europe (ZFE) for certain reasons and re-joined under a new name in a new forum, called Z-Freunde International (ZFI).
The main reason was to put everything on a democratic, solid base. Over the years, the ZFE had attended many train shows all over Germany and also arranged their own ones at Altenbeken/Geseke and Zell. Although these events got bigger and bigger, the responsibility was always taken by just a limited number of persons. The risks, those people had taken, were enormous, and they would have been the ones to blame, if something had gone wrong.
All this support and effort draw a lot of attention to our scale, including articles in magazines and TV shows, but it was time, to bring it to a new dimension. You can easily handle a meeting of 20 people, but when it is a 100+ session, including the organization of hotels, restaurants, venue and things like this, you really talk about business.
For many of the active Z scalers there was no other solution than forming a club and spread at least the finacial risk. Unfortunately, this was blocked within ZFE, so we had no other choice than to go our own way.
Last weekend the founding session of the club took place near Wiesbaden with 37 starting members, who joined from all over Germany and Austria, to set the course into a bright Z future. The purposes are:
• Create and finance a free and independent Z scale forum, open to everyone.
• Organization and support of Z scale events, model train fairs and train shows.
• Support of Z scalers, who attend those events.
• Support of Z scale and building networks, internationally and with special regard to juniors.
The forum can be reached here: www.z-freunde-international.de It already has more than 300 members.
We don´t have an English speaking section (yet), but feel free to register and post in your native language, as Z scale is international.
The first time, anyone can see us in action will be at the Dortmund toy fair, held between April 13th to 17th.
Much more is planned, members of the club will take part with their Z groups at toy fairs in Salzburg and Vienna in autumn, and next spring ( probably March 2012), we will have the bi annual meeting at Altenbeken again. We hope, we can welcome Larry, Mr. Dave and Jeff again, together with a lot more of you.
Feel free to ask us about everything, we will keep you updated about our work in the future.
Best regards
Mattias

Congratulations, Mattais! Great looking new logo!

Good luck with the new club, like the logo and look forward to following things here and on your web site!
Best wishes
Tim

Thanks for your kind words. We´ll do our best.
Mattias