(The following story by Wayne Risher appeared on the Memphis Commercial Appeal website on September 25, 2009.)
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — The Canadian National Railway Co. marked a $100 million upgrade of its second-largest U.S. rail yard Thursday by naming it for retiring president and CEO E. Hunter Harrison.
Harrison, 64, began his railroad career as a laborer at the old Frisco Railroad Capleville yard in 1963.
With horn blaring, locomotive No. 2297 smashed through a banner stretched across the tracks to celebrate the switch to Harrison Yard. The 433-acre site, formerly known as Johnston Yard, had gone 60 years since its last major renovation.
Harrison said a 1948 redesign corrected serious safety problems but left the former Illinois Central yard badly configured for a growing CN network.
During the dedication ceremony, Harrison said his great-grandfather, whom he never knew, lost a leg in an accident at the IC yard in an earlier, more dangerous era.
The Memphis native and Kingsbury High School product said that between Harrison Yard, 297 Rivergate in Southwest Memphis, and the nearby Intermodal Gateway Memphis, CN has invested nearly $150 million in Memphis in four years.
“This gateway is critical to us. It has tremendous strategic value,” Harrison said.
As CN’s second-largest classification yard behind Chicago, it’s key to serving the Gulf Coast region.
“We think Memphis going forward is going to play a vital and larger role than it has even in the past,” Harrison said.
Added executive vice president Claude Mongeau, who will succeed Harrison on Jan.1: “This project transformed an aged, inefficient rail yard into a state-of-the-art, effectively designed major terminal capable of handling existing and future traffic quickly and efficiently. Today’s yard can handle nearly double the traffic the old facility could in a 24-hour period.”
Harrison said business and political leaders and members of the public can help grow the city’s logistical strengths by continuing to support improvements in the area’s transportation infrastructure.
Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton said, “This railroad has played a key role in our economic progress. We are facing the new age of railroads and the CN has positioned us to share the new opportunities. Today, the CN helps position Memphis at the center of the green transportation movement as well.”
Harrison said he’d worked for a bakery and a gas station and as a paperboy before he heard about the Frisco Railroad paying good money. A student at then-Memphis State College, he got a job as a carman-oiler at Capleville.
Harrison has led CN since 2003.
He was president of the Illinois Central when it was bought by CN in 1998 in the first of $10 billion in acquisitions of smaller railroads.
He said he’s proud of the worst-to-first turnaround at CN since it went public in 1995. It has gone from losing millions to as much as $1.3 billion a year in free cash flow, and he expects it to generate $700 million in free cash flow this year despite the recession.
“I am extremely, extremely bullish on railroads going forward,” Harrison said. “The country is begging for a more efficient rail system. We’re more environmentally friendly. We’re more energy-efficient.”
He said problems including highway congestion, budget constraints and labor shortages “all point to big railroads.”
Harrison said in an interview that the honor meant a lot.
“I was very touched and I was very appreciative of that, and I think my wish would be that people would say, ‘You know, there was a guy that was a driver of efficiency and productivity and because of that influence, this yard is going to be even better. We’re not going to walk on his reputation and let this yard be an underachiever.'”