I'm not exactly technical in terms of the LN network, but I'm looking into this. How is a payment channel created - are you creating channels by connecting to other nodes?
You need to run Bitcoin Core in testnet mode.
You then start up the Eclair node, which is a lightning network node.
Then you connect to a channel, and wait 6 confirmations on testnet.
This is very early days, and we have no block discovery tool. The best we can do right now is to connect manually to each other and send each other some testnet coin.