Rail Buffs Dedicated to Restoring Old Station : Simi Valley: A love of trains has inspired a small group of volunteers to spend nine years salvaging the Santa Susana depot. Now they await federal funding.

The word travels quickly from man to man at the old Santa Susana railroad depot.

Even before the shriek of the Amtrak train’s greeting to them cuts through the twilight quiet of Santa Susana Knolls, they know that the train is coming.

About a dozen men show up at the depot every Wednesday night and Saturday morning. They are intent on turning the historic landmark, a symbol of Simi Valley’s earliest days, into a museum.

But at the heart of their restoration effort is a love of trains, and the railroad enthusiasts are likely to toss aside paintbrushes, hammers and nails whenever a train goes by.

Automatically, they rush to take positions facing the tracks, leaning from the depot’s open cargo-loading door or standing alongside the faded yellow-and-brown building.

They have seen plenty of trains go by in their day, but each one is still magical. The silver train comes into sudden sight from the west, speeding around a curve right toward the small greeting party.

From an open window, the engineer waves. The men stand in a silent salute, watching the train whisk out of sight into the Santa Susana Mountains, onward to Los Angeles. Then they turn to each other and resume conversation.

The spell is broken, but only temporarily. Metrolink is due to roll by in a few more minutes and, when it does, the whole sequence of train worship will commence again.

Bill Rehart, one of the volunteer workers, searched for a way to explain the odd little ceremony, a mixture of nostalgia for the depot’s glory days--when every orange and walnut that left Simi Valley passed through that depot--and a romantic vision of the passing train.

“I guess it’s also because the train is going somewhere and, in a way, you kind of say, ‘Geez, I’d like to be going there too,’ ” Rehart said. “You’re kind of envisioning what is at the end of the track.”

Rehart and about 10 others have been gathering at this remote corner of Simi Valley to work on the 91-year-old historical building for nine years.

With faithful but few hands to help and fewer funds available, the process of restoring the old Southern Pacific railroad building has been painfully slow. It took them four years just to build bathrooms for the place.

Help is finally in sight for the volunteers. Earlier this year, the California Transportation Commission awarded a $250,000 grant to the depot owners, the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District.

The grant money for landscaping and exterior repairs has yet to make its way to Simi Valley. Park district spokesman Rick Johnson said he hoped that it would be available by December, in which case work could begin on the depot exterior in the early spring, once the state approves the plans.

Until the grant comes through, the project depends on the Rancho Simi Foundation, which has been raising money for the depot since 1985. But the proceeds from bake sales and baseball game fund-raisers have added up slowly, and the building needs a great deal of work to overcome damage by fire, vandals and years of disuse.

“It’s a labor of love,” said Walt Griffin, an Agoura Hills schoolteacher who has been a leader in the restoration effort. “But it has been very frustrating. You know, if I’d had the money, I would have had it done in a year.”

The district bought the depot in 1974 from Southern Pacific. According to Simi Valley resident Ken Garges, who is writing a history of the local railroads, Southern Pacific shut the place down in 1964, converting it to warehouse space.

At that point, the depot was still in its original location, between Los Angeles Avenue and the railroad tracks, about 500 feet from Tapo Street. In 1975, when Los Angeles Avenue was widened, the park district moved the depot to Santa Susana Park.

Although the district had only paid $1.06 for the redwood structure, it cost about $25,000 to move it to the park. After that, the financially strapped district could never find the money in its budget to pay for the restoration.

The Simi Valley Historical Society has not taken an active role in the restoration. Instead, the society has concentrated its efforts on preserving other landmarks, such as the Simi Adobe and Strathearn House.

So the depot sat at the park for a lonely decade, boarded up, its paint peeling, dust swirling around its bare foundation.

Over the years, vandals broke all the windows and an arsonist set fire to the depot, destroying the upstairs apartment where the depot agents had lived.

Then Griffin and his friends in the Santa Susana Model Railroad Club discovered the depot. It seemed to them the perfect spot to set up a vast model of the area’s old railroad system from the 1920s, showing stations from Oxnard to Burbank.

But the park district was not selling the property, or renting it. Instead, they worked out an agreement in which the model railroaders would raise money for the Rancho Simi Foundation, do some restoration and still be able to use the space for their model trains.

The history buff in Griffin was quickly lured away from the model trains by the intrigue of the real depot.

“It wasn’t intentional,” he said. “But now I work on the depot way more than the train layout.”

The volunteers are an introverted bunch, Griffin said, prone to long, companionable silences. They are tied together by a sense of nostalgia and an interest in history. Working on the depot is their version of a night out at a bar, he said.

Beyond installing bathrooms for the public, the restoration plans call for returning the waiting rooms, ticket office and freight room to their original condition.

Southern Pacific railroad depots were always quite simple, according to Garges, and practically identical. The original Moorpark depot, long since torn down, was built on the same standard plan as the Santa Susana depot.

Garges first saw the station in 1937, when he arrived in Simi Valley by passenger train. He described it as a bustling little station, filled with farmers shipping out their fruits and nuts and with residents picking up household items they had ordered by catalogue.

The park district and the volunteers envision it becoming a bustling place again, visited by schoolchildren and residents curious about Simi Valley’s past.

But for now, they work away quietly, making small discoveries--a pile of coal in the wall they have put away for a future display, the original sign that used to hang on the side of the building found at a flea market--and waiting for that money.