Today, the Napa Valley Wine Train marks its 20th anniversary with a special ride and evening meal.

There are older institutions in the valley, but the Wine Train’s 20 years have been quite an odyssey — even if the run is always from the McKinstry Street depot in Napa to St. Helena and back.

Launching the Wine Train was a mighty struggle, much of which is chronicled in Dr. Alvin Lee Block’s unpublished memoir, “A Dragon in the Valley,” an excerpt of which ran in the Register on March 30, 2008. The political fight about the Wine Train was an epic that managed to touch everyone from wine barons to average citizens, politicians and financiers, Public Utilities Commission regulators and judges within and without the valley.

Vince DeDomenico, who ran the train with an iron fist until his passing at age 92 in October of 2007, was one of those people about whom everyone has a strong opinion.

Today, the Wine Train’s dragon days seem to be behind it.

It is a regular feature of life here.

The years-long litigation between St. Helena and the Wine Train is a thing of the past.

Its clientele includes visitors who return year after year to take in Napa Valley’s food-and-wine delights while rolling along the rails.

The train is pulled by a clean compressed natural gas engine, something that had not been invented when the Wine Train was launched.

To the surprise of those who would bet that the underworld would have frozen over first, Wine Train passengers now are disembarking from time to time in St. Helena.

Meanwhile, Napans continue to place hopes that the Wine Train someday will be able to move commuters up and down the valley, something Block and his colleagues first considered when the Wine Train was just a dream. That remains a longshot for a number of reasons, but Wine Train CEO Greg McManus is open to these dreams — and anything that will help the train and the valley prosper.

The Wine Train may not leave the valley, but the view has change mightily in 20 years.