I thought I had found him: a chief executive who is the exception to the rule that no leader is indispensable.
They rewarded him with their overwhelming backing for $84m in repayment of the pay he had forfeited on leaving Canadian Pacific, another rail company, in January.
Two days later, another pugnacious 72-year-old - Sir Martin Sorrell, long-serving chief executive of advertising group WPP - faced his investors. Holders of 21 per cent of shares voted against his £48m pay package, or abstained, compared with more than a third in 2016, when the overall amount up for approval was a record £70.4m.
Sir Martin is visibly healthier than the oxygen-sipping Mr Harrison. As I wrote in 2015, he is the Benjamin Button of advertising, looking progressively younger as he ages. But the terms on which he is paid and his indispensability are also in question. With each year that passes, as Standard Life, the big institutional investor, pointed out at the annual meeting, "the time to address succession for the CEO shortens and the necessity to do so becomes more pressing".
Mr Harrison's case for receiving tens of millions of dollars is arguably stronger than Sir Martin's. He has revolutionised the performance of a number of railroads, removing one doubt that hangs over one-hit leaders: can they repeat the trick at another organisation?
He wrote the book - two books, in fact - on "precision railroading", a system to improve punctuality and efficiency. To fans, he is the Eiji Toyoda of freight rail, though his ruthless approach riles unions, workers and occasionally customers.
The markets have already shown how valuable they think he is. "His entering the building changes things just by itself," Anthony Hatch, a New York-based analyst, told me. Since Mantle Ridge, an activist hedge fund, made public its plan to install Mr Harrison at CSX, the railroad's shares have surged nearly 50 per cent.
The board grudgingly appointed him in March and left investors with the choice of backing the $84m reimbursement package or losing the wizard who had already conjured up as much as $11bn of stock price appreciation. Under the circumstances - and despite Mr Harrison's unspecified health problems - shareholders were as likely to ditch their driver as the crew of the Cannonball Express would have been to offload Casey Jones in the middle of an ambush by bandits.
Sir Martin's situation is different. He is also a hired hand but one with the skills of an entrepreneur. He built WPP to its current size from the small wire products manufacturer in which he bought a stake in 1985.
Yet, like Mr Harrison, Sir Martin has acquired an aura of indispensability that shareholders are naturally reluctant to challenge as long as WPP continues to increase revenues and profit. Meanwhile, the annual circus of protest about Sir Martin's pay packet masks the more important question raised by Standard Life of who or what comes next.
The problem with the myth of the indispensable chief executive is that the more willing shareholders are to believe it, the more they have to pay to sustain it.
In 1993, a newspaper in Mr Harrison's hometown of Memphis asked why he chose railroading as a career. "Money," he replied. "It was the best-paying job you could find if you were lucky enough to get one."
His luck has held. Having started out oiling railcar wheels, he now commands rich pay and incentives each time he takes a new railroad job.
For CSX investors, though, hiring Mr Harrison is a short-term bet. Whether it pays off depends on his being there long enough to work his turnround alchemy - and give way to a successor.
The evidence is that he is already having an impact. But CSX is a complex challenge. There are few safeguards in case he fails, or, worse, departs before the job is done.
Both Mr Harrison and Sir Martin have an eye on their legacies. But the real proof of whether they are suffering from Ozymandian delusions or have laid down a sound future foundation will only come after they leave.
In fact, the long-term success of their companies depends on their not being indispensable. Their job is to engineer a locomotive that any competent successor can drive, and agree to hand over the controls well before there is any risk of the train hitting the buffers.
andrew.hill@ft.com
Twitter: @andrewtghill
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017
