page_title: Fairfax Harrison
section_title: 1920s
hierarchical_section_title: Fairfax Harrison / Railroad career / 1920s
caption_attribution_description: English: Fairfax Harrison (1869 - 1938), president of Southern Railway Compnay, half-length portrait, taken on board a ship.
context_page_description: Fairfax Harrison was an American lawyer, businessman, and writer. The son of the secretary to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Harrison studied law at Yale University and Columbia University before becoming a lawyer for the Southern Railway Company in 1896. By 1906 he was Southern's vice-president of finance, and in 1907 he helped secure funding to keep the company solvent. In 1913 he was elected president of Southern, where he instituted a number of reforms in the way the company operated.
  By 1916, under Harrison's leadership, the Southern had expanded to an 8,000-mile network across 13 states, its greatest extent until the 1950s. Following the United States' entry into World War I, the federal government took control of the railroads in December 1917, running them through the United States Railroad Administration, on which Harrison served. An economic boom after the war helped the company to expand its operations; Harrison worked to improve the railroad's public relations and to upgrade the locomotive stock by introducing more powerful engines. Another of his concerns was to increase the amount of railroad track and to extend the area serviced by the railway.
context_section_description: An economic boom in the south following the end of World War I greatly increased Southern's revenues. Harrison spent a good deal of time traveling around the southern United States, endeavoring to increase southern industry. When he traveled, he used two private railroad cars, named the Carolina and the Virginia. Other railroad presidents used only one, which made Harrison's practice unique. The Carolina was a sleeping car and the Virginia was set up to serve members of the Board of Directors, with a kitchen, dining room, and observation area.
  Harrison attempted to increase the power of Southern's locomotives. In 1923, engineers under his direction created the plans for the P-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. The roof of each engine was painted brick red. 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. The railroad took occupancy of the building in the middle of 1929.
  During these years, Harrison exhibited a number of personality quirks that became legendary. One was his habit of calling in subordinates to dine with him in the executive dining room by sending them a blue chip that had the meal's conversational topic written on it. 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.
caption: Harrison in 1927
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