When railroad passengers from Europe reach London these days and emerge from the tunnels, blinking into the sunlight, they may be forgiven for thinking they have arrived not at a train station, but in the chancel of a vast Victorian cathedral.

It is a holy-looking place with a holy-sounding name: St. Pancras. After 50 years of neglect, decay and the threat of demolition as recently as 10 years ago, this north London terminal is a place of soaring ceilings, intricate inlaid stonework, scores of gargoyles, acres of stained glass, fluted iron columns, corbels, crocketed finials — all the components of ecclesiastic glory and yet for nothing more mundane than the arrival and departure of railway trains.

More than a billion dollars was spent on the refurbishment, and a year after its reopening, no one seems to mind the over-indulgence. Not for nothing was the terminal named for a patron saint of children: Parents bring hundreds of youngsters there each day to see and experience a monument to mechanized movement like few others in existence.

There was a time when great railway stations were themselves destinations. They were architectural marvels, crafted from marble, oak, granite and iron.

The ever-changing chatter of towns and countries up on the mechanical timetable boards were the stuff of high romance: Trains were leaving for Kyle of Lochalsh, Vladivostok, Cochin, Albuquerque. The hidden loudspeakers squawked a kind of public poetry.

And the engines steamed and snorted, dripped oil and fire, and were made from iron and brass and had driving wheels taller than a man and 10 times heavier. They belonged to lines like the Great Western or the New York Central or the Bombay, Baroda & Central India; they had green and red and gold liveries polished to a high gloss, and proud engineers forever wiping clean each drop of grease or speck of grime.

But then, as we well know, the automobile and air travel took over, the railways fell from favor, the hiss and chuff and roar of steam was replaced by the drone of oil and electric traction, and scores of great city railway stations became mausoleums.

This was particularly the case in the United States in cities such as Denver and Cincinnati. And perhaps saddest of all, Oakland’s great 16th Street Station, once a beaux-arts beauty, was replaced by an inglorious shack.

Some stations, however, were simply built too grand to be demolished or forgotten. And because railroads are now said to be undergoing a revival or sorts because of the high cost of flying — these great stations are being rediscovered, retooled and reburnished.

In New York, visitors come to Grand Central Terminal not necessarily for a ride, but to gaze at the vaulted ceiling or to look down at views that echo Kurt Hulton’s famous photograph of its shafts of midday window-light, to see the swirls of scurrying people around the clock, to watch the meetings and the partings, the happy, the homesick and the homeless.

Yet what is missing from Grand Central, and from many American stations, are the trains. All too often in American city terminals, they lurk below ground, down narrow escalators, walled off and separate, like church and state.

But in European and Asian cities where land was more liberally gifted to the railway companies, immense glass-and-iron train sheds were constructed, and the people, passengers and visitors alike, commingled with the trains they sheltered.

St. Pancras is an example. The same was true at Waterloo, at Paddington, at King’s Cross, at the Gare du Nord. People were welcomed to come and stand by the locomotives and — as children, certainly — talk to the engineers.

They could wave farewells, could even walk and hold hands with loved ones as the trains eased outward. They could drop late-written letters into the slots of the overnight mail trains. In Mumbai, India, for example, Chhatrapati Shivaji Station stands at the center of a spider’s web of local commuter lines, and more than 2 million users pour through it every day.

Two of the Paris stations, the charming Gare de l’Est and the venerable little Gare Lazare, should be on any must-see list, as should the Yaroslavsky Terminal in Moscow, where the Trans-Siberian Express departs from beneath its fairy-tale roof.

And then there is Venice. You debark, walk the length of the platform to the ticket barrier and there is the canal, and bobbing vaporettos, and a gaggle of arguing gondoliers. In a hundred yards, the railway softens into memory: The screech of brakes on iron turns to the sound of footfalls on marble, to the creak of wooden doors, to the lapping of water.