Rockin’ and Ridin’ the Rails in the Free World

The whine of jigsaws and the smell of glue guns hits even before the eyes can adjust to the cool interior of the cavernous building.

Looking like a cross between Santa’s elves and the backstage crew at a Grateful Dead concert, more than a dozen workers huddle over pieces of rocky landscape, graceful bridges and a towering forest of redwood trees. Others wield soldering irons and circuit boards, configuring the electronics that make the trains run on time.

The air of concentration is intense. These workers have 48 hours before their work of art hits the road. This is serious kinetic sculpture--a huge, computer-controlled model railroad that will follow Neil Young and the H.O.R.D.E. tour (for Horizons of Rock Developing Everywhere) across the country for 28 concerts in 45 days (including last week’s in Irvine).

Traveling rock shows don’t usually come equipped with their own model train setups. But this is a tour that includes Neil Young--legendary rock musician, longtime train hobbyist and the inventor of advanced wireless systems for controlling everything from the sound of the engines to the rate at which they run.

But it’s when Young’s 18-year-old son, Ben, comes in to check out the day’s progress that the real reason behind that seemingly anomalous combination is made clear.

The crew shouts out greetings as Ben rolls by in his wheelchair. Severe cerebral palsy makes movement difficult for him, so when Young wanted to share his love of trains with his son, he had to invent ways to do it.

First came the Big Red Button, which is just what it says it is--a gently domed button almost three inches across. Young built it so that Ben, who didn’t have the fine motor skills necessary to flip the set’s switches, could experience making the trains run just like any other kid.

Later, Young worked out a system that enabled the Big Red Button to replicate whatever complex maneuver was last run on the system, letting him program cool runs Ben then could set in motion with a single tap. It hooks up with another of his inventions, the CAB-1, the first remote control device for model trains.

That work led Young to form a partnership with Lionel Corp. owner Richard Kughn in 1992, creating Liontech, a research and development company that provides Lionel trains with exclusive new model train control and sound systems.

Trains have been a constant in the life of the 51-year-old rock star.

His ranch in the hills south of San Francisco includes a 2,800-foot barn that is home to a setup using 750 feet of track and enough outbuildings, mountains and twists and turns to make everybody whose mother threw away their childhood train sets weep.

Not content to invent, when Kughn decided to step down from Lionel in 1995, Young bought the company, together with an investment firm called Wellspring Associates. Now he’s become, in effect, the company’s creative director, between putting out the limit-testing albums that mark him as one of the rock ‘n’ roll greats.

In the days leading up to the July 11 launch of the HORDE tour, Young stops in at the Redwood City train depot almost every day, making suggestions and going over the blueprints with the crew. And each time, he comes up with newer, cooler things for the track to do.

It’s hard to call it work, says Bruce Koball, a computer programmer who’s been working with Young for more than three years on various train projects.

“We’ve had some wonderful collisions,” Koball says, hunched over a workbench littered with circuit boards and chips holding two megabytes of sampled sounds that can almost exactly duplicate a steam engine revving up a particularly steep hill or brakes squealing as it comes down the other side.

HORDE-goers will be able to wander into a tent containing the train layout and play with the 320 feet of track, carefully watched over by the road crew.

One reason is that it’s just so cool. But there’s another as well: A shrewd businessman, Young wants to introduce a new generation to the joy of model trains.

“Neil’s thing has been to get the kids off the computers and back into real toys,” says Brian Scott, the technician in charge of the layout during the tour.

To that end, Young and Lionel are bringing along technology that won’t even hit the stores for several years. Called LionVision, each locomotive has a tiny digital camera and microphone in its nose, supplementing the cameras placed strategically along the layout.

As the trains are maneuvered around the tracks, onlookers will be able to gaze at large video screens for a train’s-eye view as the engines speed around curves and through gorges.

At one point, in a beautifully crafted in-joke, the train will disappear into a long tunnel. Those looking at the layout will see nothing. But those watching the screen will catch a glimpse of an intricately precise Grand Central Station-like layout, complete with commuters, ticket takers and panhandlers.

It wasn’t an easy task to convince the suits at Lionel to go along with Young’s vision.

“We had a lot of business types wondering why we were taking Lionel--and all that marketing money--to a rock ‘n’ roll venue and not a toy show,” says John Kitterman, Lionel’s director of product development.

But model trains are changing, and this is exactly the audience they need to reach.

In fact, the line between video games and the hands-on experiences of playing trains is fast blurring. In the next few years, Lionel will debut a system that lets hobbyists hook up their trains to the Internet. The video and audio from the engine will go not just to a video screen, but can also be sent out online.

“Say I’m in Indianapolis and Neil’s in California. He calls up and says, ‘Kit, you’ve got to see my new layout!’ And hey, I’m there, seeing it on my computer screen and even driving the locomotive,” Kitterman says.

It’s that future that Young will show his fans. But right now, it’s being broken into 12 pieces for transport to the Shoreline Amphitheater a few miles away, where the first concert of the tour would begin in less than two days.

Despite the frenzy, each of the six crew members who will spend the rest of the summer on the road with this enormous toy are almost giddy.

It’s business, sure, says Kitterman, who is as likely to pull out a guitar and jam with Young during the afternoon as he is to answer pages. But it’s a right-thinking one.

“Toys are good karma,” he says with a smile that never really goes away. “You can’t really go wrong.”