Trains stir memories of lives never lived . . .

The deep orange glow of the setting sun slanted across the platform beside the railroad tracks on Van Nuys Boulevard, just south of the General Motors plant. Eight men lounged there, talking quietly, or stalked over to peer impatiently down the tracks every now and then, checking the equipment they carried.

They recalled images of the bad guys in “High Noon,” waiting with malevolent patience and well-oiled revolvers beside the dusty Western tracks.

Passenger trains do that. Secretly, they are vehicles from another dimension. They worked their way so deeply into the fabric of civilization in the 19th and early 20th centuries that even now, a good two generations after they began to vanish as practical personal transportation in the United States, they still carry an aura of a world in which things are slightly more dramatic, where archetypes come to dinner and life has a sound track.

Trains stir memories of lives never lived, recall the ghosts of lovers never met, the sorrow of tragedies unborne.

The folk songs about trains are numberless, but who knows a rousing ballad to the airline shuttle between San Francisco and LAX? Songwriters still appeal to the whistle of the freight train to evoke the loneliness of the vast American night, writing for listeners who have never heard the sound.

Is there any image of going off to war to rival that of the duffel-bag-toting soldier saying goodby to his girl in a cloud of locomotive steam, even though the sons and grandsons of the last men to do that simply got into line with the other airline passengers?

Is there any scene of romantic reunion to match a love-struck girl hurling herself into a boyfriend’s arms for a welcome-home kiss in a train station?

Riding a passenger train somehow gets a better grip on these images from another world that we cannot bear to leave, for the same reason movies and TV shows set in the present day commonly show travelers talking in a convertible as they drive down a two-lane road. This is accepted as everyday and contemporary by viewers who spend their lives in closed cars on freeways.

The watchers by the track were not gunmen but train buffs, enjoying the novelty of having passenger train service through the San Fernando Valley. The politicians and press and special trains that inaugurated the service had come and gone. The buffs had shown up, two of them toting videotape cameras and three wearing Southern Pacific caps, to ride into the sunset for 30 minutes from Van Nuys to Simi Valley.

Mark Brill of Panorama City, a clerk in an aerospace firm, brought his four children. Kevin, who is 4, was excited about taking the train to “Silly Valley.”

The sunset had come and gone when the San Diegan finally rolled in from Glendale at 9:52, 36 minutes late. The conductor apologized that freight traffic on the line had delayed it.

Although the service was only two days old, the train’s six cars held about 200 passengers.

“Next stop, Chatsworth,” the conductor announced.

There is something about hearing even the most common place-name called out by a train conductor that invests it with the glamour of that other dimension.

Deepest Chatsworth. Mysterious Oxnard. Romantic Santa Barbara.

A large number of the passengers at this point were Santa Barbarans who had decided to take advantage of the new service for a daylong rolling party. Setting off from home at 7:45 a.m., they had a three-hour afternoon layover in San Diego for lunch before the start of the trip back.

They were in good spirits. Lino Morales, who runs the combination bar and grill aboard “The City of Fullerton” cafe car, said he was running short of beer and wine “and we’re out of hot dogs.” The hard liquor stock was under strain but holding, he said. “We weren’t prepared for all of this.”

One car was entertained by Al, a retired hydraulic engineer with the look of a cowboy, his close-cropped gray hair creased by a hat line, his string tie held by an ornate silver clasp.

“Chatsworth?” Al muttered, peering into the dark beyond the clanging street barrier at a bowling alley and a health club.

“This can’t be Chatsworth. Where are all the bright lights?”

A natural comic, Al.

Somewhere there must be a law--perhaps of physics, or maybe mathematics or theology--that governs the demographic distribution of passengers on trains at night. The law was still in force as the train rattled on, the organ-note of its diesel horn moaning westward through the Simi Valley condo flats and the long pull northward through the coastal fruit orchards.

There was, as the law provides, one sleeping Marine, head on his bag, apparently too young to shave. There were two old men, playing cards intently. There was a mother with four children, changing a baby’s diaper in a facing seat while trying to keep two older children from running off.

There were two drunks striking up conversations with those passing through, who were sober enough themselves but walked with the drunken stagger that train passengers must master.

The train station in Santa Barbara is small, built in the red-tiled, Ye Olde Spanishe style that a vanished generation of Anglo Californians thought put them in touch with somebody else’s roots. The ocean air was salty, cool and thick, quivering on the brink of fog.

As the Marine walked toward the station, a pretty girl in a purple-flowered poncho threw herself into his arms and gave him a big kiss.