Trains Map of the Month section debuts online

By Matt Van Hattem, Senior Editor

One of the most popular features in Trains magazine is now a benefit for subscribers who visit our Web site: the Map of the Month, available as PDF files you can save or print out.
 
Use our drop-down menus to find maps by subject matter, or type your favorite railroad name into the search engine. We’ll be adding new maps on a regular basis, so be sure to check back, and see if your favorite railroad appears. And check out our free preview map that is available to everyone — Multiple-track main lines.
 
With the April 2010 issue, we’ll be publishing our 100th Map of the Month, an exciting milestone for us. Bringing this information to you every issue takes a team of dedicated people who work tirelessly. Some of them are familiar names to Trains readers:
 
Curtis W. Richards (pictured at right), the co-creator of Map of the Month, comes up with many of the ideas, and undertakes a lot of the preliminary research. Curt, an avid map collector and former geography professor, spent a year in Washington, D.C., as a faculty fellow with the Federal Railroad Administration. One day in 2001, Curt came into our office with an armload of maps, showed them to then-editor Mark Hemphill, and the idea for Map of the Month was born. “Once we got it going, it was like a locomotive going downhill,” Curt says. “We couldn’t stop it.”
 
Bill Metzger (in the middle of the image at lower right), our contributing illustrator, is the person behind the distinctive look of each map. “Every map tells you what it wants to look like,” Bill says. “I just have to get immersed in it as deeply as I can, and determine what I have that I can bring to it.” Bill also comes up with ideas for Map of the Month, and does much of his own research, drawing on his years riding the rails across the country while accompanying high-wide loads, as well as his extensive library and map collection.
 
Rick Johnson (at left in the image at lower right), lead illustrator for Kalmbach Publishing Co., has a finesse for design that ensures our maps present complex information clearly and consistently. Rick now only draws maps for Trains, but other types of illustrations as well, such as the cutaway SD40-2 in the September 1997 issue. Rick lends his talents to all 16 of Kalmbach’s magazines and some books. He attended Layton School of Art and Design in Milwaukee and came to Kalmbach in 1978. Check out Rick’s layer-by-layer cutaway of a GG1 locomotive on the Classic Trains Magazine web site.
 
Matt Van Hattem (at right in the image), Trains’ senior editor, shepherds most of the maps through from start to finish. Matt comes up with map ideas, researches and fact-checks information, works with the illustrators on presentation, and writes many of the essays that accompany the illustrations. Before coming to Trains, Matt worked with some of the top geographers in the field, editing a physical geography book by Harm de Blij and Peter Muller. “My interest in geography grew with my interest in railroading,” Matt says. “It begins with those burning questions that come every time you see a railroad line: Where do those tracks go? Who runs them? I always wanted to find out.”
 
The time and research involved in putting together these illustrations typically make the Map of the Month the two most labor-intensive pages you read in Trains Magazine. “We’re doing maps that have never been done before,” Bill says.
 
But the interest and outpouring from readers made it clear early on we were producing something of value to our customers. Will there be 100 more Maps of the Month? We hope so! As Curt likes to say, “our biggest constraint with the maps is our own ambition.”
 
Got an idea or suggestion for Map of the Month? We’re always eager to hear your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you the best in railroad journalism and railroad cartography.
 
Check out our new Map of the Month page and tell us what you think.