“Not counting the 68 years prior,” he added.

Mr. Caronetti, a retired banker, said it was the sixth time he had been on hand for the opening of a new train, having also gone on inaugural rides in Los Angeles and New Jersey.

“I’m just a train buff,” he said, wearing an M.T.A. cap he had gotten on Friday.

Another train enthusiast at the station, Marvin Loja Espinoza, 17, a senior at Aviation High School, was waiting to get on the first train leaving there.

Originally from Ecuador, he discovered his love for trains when he moved to the United States in 2005. His hometown had no trains, he said.

Struggling to make friends in a new place, he spent his lunches in the library studying train maps, he said. His knowledge of the subway lines is so extensive that his friends call him “M.T.A. Savage.”

Ian Ma, 15, said that when he was a child, he would run his toy trains back and forth across the floor of the family’s home in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

On Sunday, he couldn’t stop grinning as he snapped photographs at the new station at 72nd Street. “I’ve always been a big train guy,” he said. “And I feel like I’ve been waiting for this train my whole life.”

Pete Cerwin, 51, has lived at 72nd Street and Second Avenue for 20 years. For him, it has been “two decades of false starts, letdowns and construction.”