Train Regulars Develop Club-Car Kinship

6:20 a.m.

The loudest sound that can be heard in the parking lot in the dissipating darkness is the click of one’s own footsteps, but a few short blocks to the north the freeway noise is already beginning to boil up. It will get noticeably louder in the next 20 minutes.

Up the street, in the warm interior of Donales San Juan Saloon, Joe Oliver, an insurance personnel director from San Clemente, is having coffee and getting ready to leave on his 58-mile commute to Los Angeles.

“The drive,” he said, “is horrible. Absolutely horrible. It takes an hour and a half, but that’s presupposing that the traffic will be according to Hoyle. You try to psych yourself up for it, but by the time you get to the 605 (freeway), you’re ready to tear the wheel off the car.”

Today, however, the wheel of Oliver’s car will remain attached, just as it has been for nearly six years. At 6:40, Oliver will turn his back to the freeway, walk back up Verdugo Street about 25 yards to the train crossing, join about 60 other morning commuters waiting in the gathering dawn and watch as Amtrak train No. 571, bound for Santa Ana, Fullerton and Los Angeles, rolls into the San Juan Capistrano depot.

For Oliver and the dozens of other regular northbound Orange County commuters, the train has become not only a way to avoid long miles of creeping freeway traffic but also a type of traveling fraternity house, a rolling social club.

Individual passengers have their favorite seats, groups of passengers stake out their own territories, and any unfamiliar interloper who is riding the train just for that morning can expect the evil eye if he unwittingly settles into a veteran’s chosen seat.

“Oh, yeah, you see a lot of those little vignettes,” Oliver said. “The regulars really look askance if you take their favorite seat.”

Still, the run north is a cheerful, if slightly somnolent, ride. The commuters already on the train when it pulls into San Juan Capistrano have boarded at San Diego (at 5:25 a.m.), at Del Mar (at 5:55) or at Oceanside (at 6:11). Most of the riders must be out of bed well before the sun comes up.

Pamela Smith, a commuter from Del Mar who makes her living 105 miles away in Los Angeles teaching potential stockbrokers, is one of the more well-known commuters and, according to other riders, something of an organizer. Mel Tiedemann, one of two conductors on No. 571, said she organized a trainwide Christmas party catered by a Los Angeles restaurant (“I had to miss it because I was on vacation,” Tiedemann said, “but I understand it was a fabulous thing, quite a shebang. They were at it from L.A. all the way to Del Mar”).

Smith, who has been riding the train to work for three years, said she “sat in the back car for about a week at first, then I moved to this chair here. This group was already established, and I just became part of it.”

Coffee and Danish

Her “group” sits on the other side of the partition separating the passenger compartment of one car from the dining area, where blinking commuters line up for coffee and danish.

“Everybody has their own little territory,” Smith said. “It’s kind of like an extended family. We celebrate any occasion. We have a Christmas party every year, and groups go other places together. Our group went to Agua Caliente,” a race track in Tijuana.

Some commuters, such as Jan Janusz of San Clemente and Ed Koelsche of San Juan Capistrano, use the train to get to their jobs within Orange County. Janusz, a manager for a life insurance company, and Koelsche, an attorney, both work in Orange and cover the 23-mile commute sitting together in the smoking car. Koelsche keeps a car at the Santa Ana station, and Janusz rides with him to work from there.

“I got tired of driving,” said Janusz. “It was taking me longer and longer to get there on the freeway. I find you have to plan your life a little better this way, but it’s exciting. Most people in Southern California don’t think of riding the train. You tell people you do and they say, ‘You ride what ?’ ”

6:55 a.m.

John Bow, neat and well-pressed in his business suit, has managed to squat low enough on the Santa Ana station platform to talk face to face with his 2-year-old son, Gregory, who is there to see him off and is having a hard time keeping his excitement in check. Gregory, with his father’s arm around him, has been pointing frequently down the tracks to the south, where the rails are beginning to gleam brighter in the growing early-morning light. No. 571 can be heard long before it can be seen rounding the curve less than a mile from the platform. Its horn cuts through the early stillness of the east Santa Ana industrial neighborhood as it blows at crossings many blocks away.

2 Mornings a Week

Bow, who lives in Irvine and works as a salesman for a Los Angeles computer company, rides the train two mornings each week, on days when he does not need a car for business appointments.

“It’s a real elite clan on the train,” he said. “In some ways it’s kind of like a soap opera. There are a few close relationships.”

Riding the train is quite a departure from driving eight miles to work, which is what Bow said he did each day when he worked at an Orange County office. Still, he said, during the year that he has commuted by train to Los Angeles he has thought about the romance of “taking a train into a big city.”

Frank Pickett of Laguna Beach, an international trade financier for a Los Angeles bank, said he has “driven, gone the park-and-ride route, gone every way possible. This is the best. It’s not typical of Southern California transportation at all. How many people in Southern California ride a train, especially to work?”

Some on-the-train relationships even become protective, said Helen Fisher of Santa Ana, a bank trust officer who works in downtown Los Angeles. Fisher, who has taken the train for more than two years, said “you get to know everyone so well that if you don’t see someone on a particular day you get concerned. You wonder about them. It’s really a good group that way.”

7:10 a.m.

By the time her car pulls into the parking lot at the Fullerton Amtrak station, Jenni Fisher, a student at the Fashion Institute of Designer Merchandising in Los Angeles, already has commuted farther than many Southern Californians. A resident of Corona, Fisher says she spends more than an hour each weekday morning driving to the station from her home. She then boards the train and rides for another 45 minutes.

“But it’s worth it,” she said, grinning. “I love the socializing on the way home. And in the morning, the ride just makes my day before school. There are all those good-looking businessmen who ride the train.”

Herb Johnson, standing with Fisher on the platform, smiled.

“People can get very close,” said the Garden Grove resident, who works at the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. “It’s the same people all the time, like a little family. I took the bus for a year or so, and it was just horrendous. On the train sometimes you can let your mind wander and think you’re going to New Orleans.”

Joyce Waggoner, who lives in Brea and runs a Los Angeles life insurance agency, said No. 571 is “like you were in school, where you go to your regular seat and sit with your friends. I wouldn’t have worked in Los Angeles if there was no train, but with the train it doesn’t seem so far to go.”

Said Barbara Rosen of Fullerton, a program manager at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles, “It’s wonderful. People are always having parties, like wedding showers or divorce parties. Sometimes they’re even catered.”

7:30 a.m.

The run from Fullerton to Union Station in Los Angeles will never be cited for scenic beauty. The panorama flying by on either side of the train is largely a tableau of industrial parks, factories, barbed wire and, significant enough, the sight of the northbound Santa Ana Freeway slowing to a crawl. But the passengers hardly ever turn their eyes to the windows.

For many of them the workday has already begun. Len Johansson of Laguna Hills, a law firm administrator, and Leo Alvarado of La Habra, a U.S. Treasury Department employee, are reading the paper or going over paper work.

The counter man in the cafe car continues to ladle out dozens of cups of coffee. A few riders catch another half an hour of sleep.

Conductor Tiedemann has been at work since San Diego. At Union Station he will get off the train and immediately board No. 572, pointed southbound for Fullerton, Anaheim and his home in Santa Ana.

“This is a good job,” he said, “and you have to like it to stay with it. I’ve been working on trains for 30 years, and I’ve gotten to know everybody here fairly well. They’re a breed. If you get a new man working the train and he maybe doesn’t know where he is at a particular point, they’ll tell him. These people know the train as well as anyone.”