Fairfax Harrison

Railroad career Early career Harrison was admitted to the New York State bar in 1892 and worked for the law firm Bangs, Stetson, Tracy & MacVeagh from 1892 to 1896. After the panic had subsided, Harrison was named president of the Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville Railway, later the Monon Railroad (succeeded Ira G. Rawn after Rawn's death), which was jointly owned by Southern and the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. William Finley, president of the Southern Railway, died on November 23, 1913, and Harrison was elected as his successor eight days later. Besides the chairmanship of the Southern Railway, he was also elected to succeed Finley on three subsidiary railroads. (These three railroads were the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, the Alabama Great Southern Railway, and the Virginia Southwestern Railway.)

Another of Harrison's goals was to raise the morale of the workforce and locomotive engineers; crews were assigned to the same locomotives, and senior engineers were allowed to paint their names on their engines. When business declined in 1914, Harrison reduced his salary by 20 percent, but introduced smaller and graduated cuts for other staff, with the smallest percentages at the lowest pay scales. Other efforts to improve morale included rewards for fuel efficiency and the improvement of safety, including stricter investigation of accidents.

Harrison established a foreign trade department for the railroad, hoping to take advantage of the railway's ability to connect to the Mississippi Valley and Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports.

World War I

From 1913 to 1919, Harrison oversaw the extension of double-track on the railway's mainline between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia. The project was hampered by the war effort, but eventually covered the complete distance between the two cities. In 1916, Harrison acquired a railroad line that ran from Meridian, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana. This brought Southern Railway's track total to more than , covering 13 states. After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, some military training camps were located in the south, and much of the construction material used to build them was hauled over the Southern Railway. Harrison was elected chairman of the Railroads' War Board, a coordinating committee of railroad presidents. Its five members were tasked with eliminating bottlenecks and fostering cooperation between the various railroads.

The board's efforts failed to meet the government's expectations; in December 1917, Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, ordered the federal government to take control of the railroads by establishing the United States Railroad Administration (USRA). Harrison worked for the USRA during World War I and, under its regulations, was required to step down as chairman of the Southern Railway. By the time the USRA returned control of Southern in March 1920, its treasury was bare. A few years of operation returned a surplus to the company, which led to the stockholders requesting in 1923 that the railroad pay a dividend to the holders of the common stock, something Southern had never done. Harrison managed to block the request, but in March 1924 a subsequent demand was successful, and a dividend of $5 per share was declared. That was increased to $7 per share in 1926 and $8 in 1928 .

Harrison attempted to increase the power of Southern's locomotives. In 1923, engineers under his direction created the plans for the Ps-4 class of Pacific type locomotives, which became famous and a symbol of the Southern Railway. On a visit to England, Harrison had seen the paint scheme used by the London and North Eastern Railway, which used apple green-painted engines. Returning home in 1925, he ordered the newly delivered Pacifics painted a forest green, which he called Virginia, with gold lettering and silver trim. These engines pulled the newly refurbished passenger trains that Harrison had begun work on before the war. He also instituted new passenger lines. In 1921 the Suwannee River Special began to run between Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland down to Tampa and St. Petersburg in Florida. The Crescent Limited began service in 1925 between New Orleans and New York, with a scheduled time for the one-way trip of 37 hours and 50 minutes.

Harrison continued the public relations and advertising efforts of his predecessors; in 1924, an advertising campaign was launched with the slogan "The Southern Serves the South", which soon became well known. Harrison also spent long hours in negotiations to secure the legal foundations of the railway, consolidating the railroad's debt and acquiring majority control of some of the smaller lines that made up the railway.

In 1926, the United States government forced the railroad to move out of its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Although Harrison threatened to take the company headquarters to Atlanta, in the end, a new headquarters building was built on McPherson Square. Harrison installed a private lobby entrance leading to a private elevator to the 10th and 11th floors.

During these years, Harrison exhibited a number of personality quirks that became legendary. One was his habit of inviting subordinates to dine with him in the executive dining room by sending them a blue chip bearing the meal's conversational topic. Usually, the topics were intellectual rather than related to the running of the railroad. Another oddity was his refusal to use his railroad pass, which entitled him to free travel. Instead, he personally paid for his commute between his home and the railroad's offices.

Harrison chose not to be reappointed as president in 1937. He nominated Ernest Norris as his successor. Harrison, who was 68 at the time, planned to concentrate on his hobby of writing historical works, but he died three months after his retirement. The John's Island Stud, and Early American Turf Stock. The last came out in two volumes, the first on mares in 1934, and the second on stallions in 1935. Peter Willet, a later writer on Thoroughbreds, described him as an "indefatigable researcher in American pedigrees". Harrison also served on the Executive Committee of the Virginia Historical Society Harry DeButts, an employee and protégé, described him as "a little cold when you first met him, but underneath he was a very warm, admirable, capable and wise man". He died on February 2, 1938, and was buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia.

The College of William and Mary in Virginia holds some of his papers. A selection of his letters was published in 1944 under the title A Selection of the Letters of Fairfax Harrison. The University of Virginia library has on loan another collection of Harrison's papers. Correspondence and business files from his time as president of the Southern Railway are held by the Southern Railway Historical Society in their collection of president's files. They were loaned to the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in 2003 and were still there in 2008.