Master Planner: Noyes Retires After 30-Year Transportation Career

Written by Doug Goodnough

As a child growing up in suburban Chicago, Thomas Noyes, ’86, was fascinated with the railroad. He would often dream of working for one.

“My late father joked that the year after I was born, he took his first trip to Japan and he brought me back a little toy Japanese electric train, which apparently never worked,” Noyes said of his early passion for the railroad industry. “He thought maybe that was what [sparked] my interest. I rode the ‘L’ [train in Chicago] and also rode a few trains when we went out west when I was a little kid.”

While that dream of having a career riding the rails did not materialize, his career path did take him to the transportation industry. Noyes recently retired after 30 years as a transportation planner for the Washington State Department of Transportation.

However, the road first led to Hillsdale College, where he had to adjust to the small-school environment.

“My graduating class was over 900, and we had more than 4,000 students in the school,” Noyes said of his high school in Evanston, Illinois. “I liked the friendly, collegial atmosphere of Hillsdale, but the first year was an adjustment. I still had the big-city mentality.”

He joined the Phi Sigma Epsilon fraternity and took a liking to his history and political science classes, which helped ease his transition to Hillsdale. During his junior year, he studied overseas in England through a program affiliated with Oxford University and credited former faculty member Jim Juroe for encouraging him to apply.

After graduating from Hillsdale with a history degree, Noyes worked a couple of years in the retail industry, eventually deciding to go to graduate school. He followed his passion, enrolling at the University of Iowa’s Urban Planning program, with a concentration in transportation planning. With a master’s degree in hand, he was hired by a transportation consulting firm in San Francisco, helping with traffic engineering and studies.

“I worked on a couple of rail-related projects, but not a lot of rail stuff,” he said.

He had some friends in the Seattle, Washington, area, and decided to move there in 1992. Working as a transportation consultant for a year, Noyes was then hired by the Washington State Department of Transportation as a transportation planner, where he assisted in the central Puget Sound area.

“I became a subject matter expert, as they say, in the profession working on bicycle and pedestrian planning as related to a state highway,” Noyes said. “Like, how can you design a state highway intersection with a local street to better accommodate pedestrians? If you have a bus stop, how do people get to and from the bus stop? Because oftentimes, in areas outside of Seattle or Bellevue, and maybe in more suburban areas, there isn’t always a good sidewalk infrastructure.”

He called transportation planning a “long and engaged” process. Oftentimes, many projects never came to fruition due to funding, environmental, or political issues.

“It’s frequently broken out into phases, because projects are often so expensive that they have to be done in multiple phases just to pay for it,” he said of project funding. “Because the legislature will say, ‘Here’s $100 million; go do this part of the project.’”

Noyes’ job involved interaction with experts in many fields, including engineers and other technical staff. It also required education in areas such as logistics, data analytics, and public policy.

“You had to know a lot of terminology so you can talk their language,” he said. “I enjoyed working with local agencies and local governments. I was the point person to coordinate and communicate.”

He decided that 2023 was the end of the road for his transportation career. But his traveling days are not over. Noyes and his wife, Hideko Go, a native Korean who was raised in Japan, occasionally travel back to Japan. And he plans on traveling by train every chance he gets.

Doug Goodnough, ’90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.

Published in September 2025