In many countries, these voluntary bodies have banded together to form umbrella organisations to promote their common interests on a national level. These in turn have joined forces to form FEDECRAIL, the European Federation of Museum and Tourist Railways and Tramways. Fedecrail has members in 29 countries and represents approximately 35,000 volunteers distributed among 58 umbrella and individual member associations, as well as over 4,000 employees in the sector.
FEDECRAIL is constituted under the Belgian law. Its members are the national umbrella organisations from European countries but also include, in those countries
where none yet exists, some individual railway or museum organisations. Under its constitution, it is governed by a Council of at least six elected representatives from different European countries.
It holds a general meeting once a year preceded by a conference on topics of interest to operators of heritage railways, which is attended by delegates from member organisations from all over Europe as well as observers from other continents. In addition to producing an annual report, FEDECRAIL publishes two or three newsletters each year as well as important papers presented at its conference.
As this website uses Google Translate, some of the text in the German and French pages may appear slightly inaccurate – we are working to fix this.