Railroad model builder goes 'Back to the Future'

LANCASTER - City resident Brian Bingham is ready for the arrival of Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown on Wednesday.

That is the day Michael J. Fox's and Christoper Lloyd's time-traveling characters in "Back to the Future II" arrived when traveling from 1985.

McFly and Brown would no doubt feel at home with Bingham, who has built a fully detailed H/O scale model of Hill Valley, California, the pair's hometown, as part of his large model railroad display. There are dozens of references to the "Back to the Future" trilogy in the display, including the famous DeLorean time machine, a detailed town square, Lou's Cafe, a movie theater and a church that all depict Hill Valley in 1955.

A rural area with trees sits just behind the town. The lighted display sits on an 8-foot-by-7-foot table inside the model railroad tracks and slot car tracks traverse the model, simulating roads. Bingham also has several trains traveling around the town.

Bingham started building the display in 2005 and didn't have "Back to the Future" in mind at the time. He said he didn't want to build a simple stock town that others often build. Recreating Lancaster wouldn't work either, since the downtown area sits partly on a hill. So he worked on the rural part for a few weeks while trying to decide where to go from there.

"One day, my son was home from Ohio State for the weekend, or whatever, and we were down here talking," Bingham said. "And he went upstairs to do whatever he was doing, and a little while later, he comes back downstairs and walks over to me and says, 'Can you do anything with that?' "

His son had a small silver DeLorean in his hand and suggested building Hill Valley.

"It was just like, 'Oh yeah, that's it,' " Bingham said. "I didn't have to think twice. And that's where Hill Valley came from. A lot of the table was set up before Hill Valley ever came to mind. Being the avid modeler that I am, once I got started on it I guess I got carried away on it. And I began to try to fashion as much of the story into the thing as I could."

He said much of the display was completed by Christmas of 2005, but nowhere near the detail it now has.

"So that's what I've done for the last 10 years, is heighten the detail and just literally play with it," Bingham said. "That's what you do when you model. It's all about bringing the finest degree of detail that you can."

Bingham said it's a project that will probably never be completely finished.

The 59-year-old outdoor power equipment sales manager has been into models since childhood and found photos on the Internet of the real "Back to the Future" set to use as a reference. The display is so detailed that the Essex Theater is promoting "Cattle Queen of Montana," which it was showing in first "Back to the Future" movie and featured Ronald Reagan.

"So it's fairly faithful," he said of his work.

Bingham said he has no idea how much his display may be worth. But it is worth a lot to his brother, who teaches film studies at the Indiana University and has used photos of the display to teach about "Back to the Future."

Bingham obviously needed to be a major fan of the "Back to the Future" franchise to build such a detailed piece.

"To my way of thinking there's an honesty about it and a simplicity about it," he said of the movie trilogy. "I've always liked time-travel movies. I think there's something liberating about the idea of traveling through time. I think Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who is one of the co-writers of 'Back to the Future,' did an incredible job of tying the time-travel loose ends together, especially across three films and six hours of storytelling."

In a unique coincidence, when McFly and Brown arrive in 2015, the Chicago Cubs have just won the World Series. In real life, the Cubs have not won a world championship since 1908 and have not played in the World Series since 1945. Yet they are in the post-season now, playing the New York Mets for the right to go to the series.

Bingham's display is in a downstairs room that also houses numerous model locomotives and models of the Enterprise from "Star Trek," the space shuttle Challenger and a Saturn V rocket that propelled Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Bingham is not too optimistic about the future of his train display, however.

"It will get cut to pieces by somebody some day and hauled out to the trash," he said. "So I'll enjoy it while I can."

People who want to see more photos of the Hill Valley model display can do so at www.hillvalleymodelrr.com.

jbarron@lancastereaglegazette.com

740-681-4340

Twitter: @JeffDBarron