The hall looked like a small boy’s dream of Christmas

OK, OK, this is sexist stereotyping in the first degree. But consider this: To the everlasting bafflement, annoyance or amusement of women, many men’s taste in amusement does not change greatly as they get older. When it comes to having fun, plenty of guys of 40 are gray-haired versions of the pimply kids they were at 15. Or 10.

If they liked to hunt and play cards and hang out with the guys, they probably still do. If they holed up in their rooms with a personal computer, ditto. Football and baseball and gun nuts are forever.

Old basketball players still shoot baskets. Rock ‘n’ rollers boogie into the sunset, willing their mutinous joints to flex, darn you, flex.

If they ogled flappers when Coolidge was in office, nothing will stop them from leering at a grandmother in support stockings with a dowager’s hump you could put a saddle on.

Prosperity may have boosted them from beer and BMXs to single-malt Scotch and BMWs but the quirky hungers of the soul survive adulthood. Financial empires are built on the predictability of these undying masculine longings.

Women, bless their cute little hearts, are different.

How many matrons in sensible shoes still jump rope? Or scream and swoon over androgynous rock stars? Women who were gymnastic stars in high school, or insanely poetic, or world-class Mulholland Drive lip-crushers, happily mature into facsimiles of Barbara Bush.

Very sensible of them.

Which is probably why there were only about three women among the 75 persons who turned out for the monthly meeting of the Valley Toy Train Club in the hall behind St. Innocent Orthodox Church in Tarzana. And they were members’ wives.

Josephine Lazarides of Sherman Oaks, wife of the club president, ran the snack bar, selling homemade chocolate cake and lemon meringue pie for $1.25 a slice.

“Actually, I’d be out there operating the trains if I could get someone else to run the kitchen,” she said. “But a lot of women don’t share my views, so it’s usually just about all men here.”

The hall looked like a small boy’s dream of Christmas.

Four trains ran simultaneously around about 200 feet of track in two lanes around two ovals, about 25 feet long, connected by a nine-siding “marshaling yard.” Other trains waited in the “yard.”

The group’s members build compatible table-top units that can be linked to form layouts limited only by the number of participants and the size of the hall.

“This is a great idea,” said Chuck Dargan, 61, a visitor from the San Diego and Orange County chapter of the Toy Train Operating Society.

“A lot of guys don’t have the room for a big layout at home because they live in apartments or their wives won’t let them fill up the living room.”

“Guys can keep a small section in a closet and still play with a big set,” said Howard Packer, 42, a Los Angeles scrap-metal dealer.

Now that they’re grown up, these guys can afford all the nifty extras from the catalogue, accessories beyond the most indulgent parent--the mountain tunnel with the cellophane-blue river, the passenger station with little passengers waiting, the factory that rolls barrels into waiting freight cars, the magnetic junkyard crane that hoists tiny wrecked autos and the corral where model livestock files off the cattle car, mills about and re-boards.

“Bring out the New York Central,” someone called.

The New York Central rolled out and gathered speed, a regal symbol of a vanished age. It was painted a sophisticated Art Deco gray. Lights flickered in the cars, silhouetting on frosted glass windows its tiny passengers, gesturing and drinking martinis and leading itty-bitty Noel Coward-ish lives.

A tiny TV camera mounted in one engine relayed a picture to a black-and-white TV set, a small antique that looked startlingly gigantic plunked down in this Lilliputian world.

The magic of technology put the train buffs right down into their universe, to see the world as the engineer of a toy train would see it. They watched stations flashing past. They dived into the darkness of the tunnel and followed the track narrowing toward the horizon, where every now and then the screen showed strange gods hovering in the sky.

Packer said he got involved when a friend bought a toy train.

“I helped him set it up and right away I said, ‘Daddy, can I have one of these?’ Of course, I was 35 at the time.

“The nice part is, we can afford this stuff now. You can build a module good enough to join in for about $40, but everybody spends more. I have about $400 in.”

How much could a devotee spend?

“How much money is there in the world?”

Chris Scharfenberg, 30, a Sepulveda computer programmer, said he had invested about $10,000. Scharfenberg was enjoying a little toy-train joke. He had wired his tunnel with an electronic trigger that sounded the whistles on most locomotives passing through it.

Each time a train owner wondered aloud why his whistle had developed a life of its own, Scharfenberg chuckled quietly.

After almost three hours most people had left, but a die-hard group of about 12 kept the trains rolling.

“How do you control this thing?”

“Watch it, you’re going off the track.”

“Train wreck! Train wreck!”

Toot-tooooooot.