Trains says farewell to one of its best

The 2014 Trains staff, from left, Editor Jim Wrinn, Associate Editor Steve Sweeney, Assistant Editor Brian Schmidt, Editorial Assistant Diane Laska-Swanke, Production Editor Angela Pusztai-Pasternak, and Senior Editor Matt Van Hattem.

This is a post I would rather not write. A member of our Trains staff, Senior Editor Matt Van Hattem, is leaving at the end of the week. He has accepted a position with a major railroad engineering firm. That’s good news for the railroad business and for Matt, who is a man of great talent and boundless enthusiasm for railroading.

I will miss him for his wit and humor, his good counsel, and most of all, his amazing abilities to edit even the best writers and make their great stories shine. Matt was working at Trains when I came in 2004, and I immediately recognized that he was the power lifter on the staff, the editor who took on the most complex and difficult pieces and made them good reads full of life and spark. Many of the major feature stories you’ve read over the last decade have benefited from Matt’s careful touch, his knowledge of railroads, and his passion for the subject. They came to life with fantastic maps, charts, and graphics thanks to Matt’s understanding that the marriage of words and images matter, but there are also other ways to help readers get the point.

Matt and I shared a delightful task during our years together: Selecting a feature line up that gives readers a strong mix of stories that feed the head and the heart, that appeal to serious fans and passionate professionals, and that entertain and educate. Trust me, that’s no small order. Matt knows that we work for 93,000 customers who know that railroading is the most fascinating business on Earth, a swirling kaleidoscope of economics, geography, technology, history, politics, and so much more. Capturing it, distilling it to fit into 76 pages each month, 12 times a year, plus daily web content, is a feat. But Matt accepted the challenge, and boy did we have fun with it.

I could go on and on about Matt and his work at Trains for you the readers, but I cannot get to them all. But I do need to tell you about one more. One of Matt’s strongest areas of expertise is the maps you see in our pages. Matt has worked with mapmaker Bill Metzger to prepare the map of the month feature in Trains – the two most complex pages that we publish in each issue – and he’s done it with consistent excellence. So good have these been that we published a greatest hits collection, Railroad Maps, last summer. So closely do we associate Matt with maps that we often jokingly call him “Map Van Hattem.” It’s a title of affection and hard earned appreciation.

So, now you know why this is a tough post to write. I often said that I wouldn’t want to publish an issue of Trains without Matt, but now I will have to. Join me in wishing Matt well in his new endeavors and happy rails for years and miles ahead.