An INTJ man’s conclusion comes out as a redesigned arrangement, and a redesigned arrangement is a complete, impersonal statement that the last one was wrong — built by people still sitting in the room. Organizations learn to aim him at their worst problems and then to charge him for the wreckage, and both halves of that are earned.
I was twenty-seven when Leland Voss took ninety seconds to kill something I had spent five months building, and he was right, and I hated him for nine years.
It was a proposal to run the Tullis turn six days instead of three. I had the car counts, I had the shipper letters, I had a page of it in color. I got through most of it.
“How are you getting up Ordway hill with that tonnage.”
I said we’d add a unit.
“You have six units on this property and five of them are committed. So you’re renting one. For how long?”
I said I hadn’t priced that.
“Then you don’t have a proposal,” he said. “You have a preference.”
He was not angry. He wrote something on the back of my handout and slid it across, and I did not look at it in the room because I was busy being twenty-seven, and what he had written was the tonnage rating for a single unit on that grade and, under it, the two industries whose volume would have to move to make the sixth day work, and one of those two moved three years later, and by then I had the note in a drawer at home.
Leland came to Broadaxe Rail Group in 1994, twenty-nine, out of a Class I’s operating department where he had been told he had no future. He is a heavy, slow-walking man with a bad knee and an old canvas grip he has carried since before I met him. He answers email at four in the morning in complete paragraphs. He does not do small talk and he does not pretend to; if you tell him about your weekend he will wait, politely, with his hands still, until you have finished. He has never in thirty years said a cruel thing to my face. He has said a great many exact ones, which several people I respect found harder.
The Kell River & Northern is a hundred and ninety miles of ex-Class I branch that Broadaxe bought in 1991 for less than the scrap value of the rail. It runs from the interchange at Ordway through Tullis to the end of track at Bracken. We haul stone, fertilizer, plastic pellets, and glass sand, and we have a paint scheme that two general managers have tried to modernize and will not be modernized. There is a cat in the Ordway enginehouse that the crews call Ballast, and Ballast is at least the fourth cat to hold the name, and everybody knows this and nobody says it.
Here is what the group decided about Leland Voss. The reading was not my invention. The phrasing that stuck was, and I supplied it in a hotel bar, to the one person who was going to act on it.
Every time we put Leland in charge of something, we lose two good people.
I need that sentence to sit there for a second, because the defense of it is strong. It was not a slander. We could name them. Two after Ordway Yard, one of whom had thirty-four years and did not work again. One after the mechanical consolidation. Two more after he took operations, including a trainmaster who is now a hospital security supervisor and who will not come to a reunion. That is a real ledger with real people on it, and every one of them was displaced by a decision that was correct, and being displaced by a correct decision does not pay a mortgage or make a man feel like anything.
So the sentence was true. It took me most of a career to see that a true sentence is also an instrument, and that whoever picks it up decides where it points.
Malcolm Deeb ran the group for nineteen years and had a formula that everybody under him could recite.
“Send Leland in. Then get somebody in there afterward who can talk to people.”
The Ruling Grade
Everything on a railroad comes down to one hill.
The ruling grade of a subdivision is the steepest sustained climb a train has to make, and it sets the tonnage a given set of locomotives can lift over the whole line — not the average grade, not the nice part, the worst part. You can have a hundred and eighty miles of beautiful railroad and one two-mile pull out of a river valley, and that pull decides how long your trains are, how many crews you start, what you can promise a shipper, and whether the whole property makes money. Nothing about the arrangement changes it. You can have a meeting about it.
Ordway hill is a shade over one per cent for two and a quarter miles with a curve at the top that costs you the equivalent of another quarter per cent, and every operating plan the Kell River has ever had is a response to that hill, whether the person who wrote the plan knew it or not.
Leland found the ruling grade of an organization in about three weeks. Not the hill — the constraint that was actually setting the terms while everybody negotiated around it. Then he acted on it. And what a room experiences, when a man walks in on day twenty-two and reorganizes the thing around a constraint they have spent twenty years arranging themselves comfortably against, is not gratitude.
The 1207 is a 1953 unit that has not earned its keep since the second Bush administration. It is on the roster because a crew put a hand-lettered sign in the cab window in 2006 when it was listed for sale and the sign stayed up for most of a season and eventually the listing came down. It moves cars in the yard perhaps twice a week and burns fuel like a house fire and there is a photograph of it in the group’s annual report, which is how these things get decided in the end.
I keep bees, badly, and have for six years, and I have never once gotten a full super off them, and I intend to keep going.
Ordway Yard
In 2003 the group gave him Ordway Yard, which was losing money in a way nobody had bothered to isolate.
He was there five weeks before he did anything. He rode every job. He sat in the yard office at three in the morning with a legal pad. Buster Kemp, who had been roadmaster since 1979 and who still is, told me later that he had assumed the man was lost.
Then he put out a plan that flattened three shifts into two, killed the afternoon transfer, moved the interchange window ninety minutes later to catch the connection we had been missing for a decade, and took the yardmaster position at Tullis out entirely.
Car cycle time on the property went from twelve days to under seven inside a quarter. Two shippers who had been threatening to go to trucks stayed. The stone quarry doubled its loadings in three years on the strength of a schedule that finally matched their crushing.
Odell Tunny had thirty-four years and had been the Tullis yardmaster for nineteen of them and was fifty-six years old. The position went away. There was a job for him at Ordway on the ground, at a lower rate, and he took it for seven months and then he took a disability that most people thought was about his back and some people thought was not. I went to see him in 2011 and we watched most of a ballgame and he asked after everybody by name and did not ask after Leland.
Buster and I were in a hi-rail at the bottom of the hill the week the plan came out.
“He’s not wrong,” Buster said.
I said that was what everybody kept saying.
“No, listen.” He had a chew in and he took his time. “He’s not wrong, and he didn’t come tell Odell. He sent it. Thirty-four years and it came in an envelope with everybody else’s.”
I asked what he should have done.
“Drove out there,” Buster said, and put the truck in gear.
What It’s Like to Work for Him
I worked for Leland from 2000 to 2015 and everything I know about running a railroad I got from him.
He would not answer a question you had not thought about. He would send back a two-line email that said what is the constraint and nothing else, and the first year I found that contemptuous and by the fourth year I had started doing it in my own head before I wrote to him. He gave credit accurately, which is rarer than generously. He never once asked me to soften something so it would land better, and he never once noticed that I was doing it anyway, on his behalf, three or four times a week, for fifteen years.
The best night I ever had on a railroad was in 2006 when we put five cars on the ground at the north end of Tullis at half past ten at night with a chemical load third from the head end. I called him twenty minutes later. He was there at one, in the same clothes he had been wearing at the office, and he stood at the edge of the ditch light for a while and then he took the grip off the hood of the truck and set it down and started talking.
He did not ask a single question about how it happened. He put the hazmat contractor, the county, the shipper, and our own mechanical people in an order, out loud, in about ninety seconds, and gave each of them the thing they needed to hear and nothing else, and then he told me what the railroad would be doing at six and at noon and at six the next evening, and every one of those turned out to be right within about an hour.
At four in the morning a deputy asked him who was in charge and he said I was.
“He’s had it since the call went out,” he said. “I’m just here.”
That was not true and everybody standing there knew it was not true and it was the most useful sentence anybody said all night, and I have never been able to reconcile the man who chose to say that with the man who sent Odell Tunny an envelope. I have stopped trying. They are the same man and the sentence in the ditch cost him nothing and the drive to Tullis would have cost him a morning.
He also cost me things. He corrected me in front of the mechanical department in 2007 on a number I had wrong, publicly, in one sentence, and it was accurate and I have not forgotten a minute of it. He restructured my department in 2012 and told me on the day it went out. When my father died he sent a card with a printed message and his signature and nothing added, and I know now that he had gotten the schedule changed that week so I would not have to be at Ordway, and I did not learn that until 2021, and I will not pretend that finding it out fixed the card.
Ines Bracco kept a photograph of a locomotive on fire on the wall behind her desk, which was not one of ours and which she would not explain to anybody who asked, and about half the shop believed it was a threat.
She came to the group in 2010 and ran mechanical, and she had a version of the same instrument — she could see the shape of a shop’s problem from the doorway — and she delivered it about as gently as he did, which is to say not at all. She was gone in three years. Her last week she stopped by my office and asked whether I was going to be all right working for him, which nobody had ever asked me, and I said something about how you get used to it.
“That’s the part I’d think about,” she said. Nobody ever said of Ines that she was worth the trouble, because the sentence worth the trouble was never constructed about her; there was no ledger where her value and her cost were being weighed against each other over decades. Leland got twenty-five years of being expensive and useful. She got thirty-eight months. That difference is the whole subject, and the accounting for it sits on the other page.
Broadaxe put nineteen people into general manager or officer roles between 2001 and 2022. Fifteen were men. I pulled it two winters ago while I was building a slate and I have not shown it to anybody.
In the spring of 2018 I was at a conference in a hotel with a lobby bar and Aylward Ostrom from the sponsor sat down next to me and bought me a drink and asked me, in the way people ask when they have already started, what it was actually like to work for Leland.
I told the truth for about twenty minutes. The mechanical department in 2007. The restructuring. The card. Odell Tunny in an envelope. Every word of it accurate, every word of it mine to tell, and I chose that bar and that man and that hour, and I finished on the sentence about two good people.
Aylward laughed and put his glass down.
“Say that again for me,” he said. “Slower.”
Bracken
The branch to Bracken is thirty-one miles of light rail serving a fertilizer terminal and, when the tourist outfit is running, a passenger operation nobody has ever made money on.
Leland brought a recommendation to the group in 2019 to embargo it above milepost nineteen, negotiate the terminal onto truck-and-transload at Tullis, and put the deferred tie money into the Ordway hill instead, where it would earn. The analysis was airtight. I have it in front of me right now.
The vote went against him, four to two, and I was one of the four.
Let me put down my reasoning, precisely, because I have had seven years to improve it and I will not. The tourist operation had two county commissioners on its board. The terminal’s owner had been on the property since 1988 and had a relationship with Malcolm. And I had spent eighteen months being the person in that room who could keep a shipper from calling the sponsor, and voting with Leland would have cost me that position, and I knew it while my hand was in the air.
I found him in the parking lot afterward putting the grip in the trunk of a rental.
I said something about how it had been close.
“It wasn’t close,” he said. “Malcolm had it before we sat down.” He shut the trunk. “You voted the way you had to vote. You’ll get the branch in about six years and it’ll cost more.”
I have thought a great deal about whether that was generous or whether it was simply accurate and he did not notice the difference, and I lean, on the whole, toward the second, and I am aware that leaning that way costs me nothing.
He did not argue after the vote. That is the thing people never believe about him. He sent a revised plan the following week that took the board’s decision as a constraint and optimized around it, and it was good, and we ran it for five years.
In 2020 the group moved him to corporate development. It came with a bigger title and an office he never used, and the work was real — he did the diligence on five acquisitions and killed two of them and saved the sponsor a great deal of money. It also had nobody reporting to him. Nobody said that out loud in any document. Malcolm said, in a hallway, that Leland was finally being used the way he should have been used all along.
I took operations that year.
When the group sold in 2024 he took the package at fifty-nine. There was a dinner. I gave the toast and it was a good toast, and I told the story about the tonnage rating on the back of my handout, and everybody laughed in the right place.
He came over afterward with his coat already on.
“Good toast,” he said. “The number was a hundred short.”
Gideon
Last year I had to rationalize the Tullis branch, which is the same class of problem as Bracken and about sixty per cent of the size.
I gave it to Gideon Mull.
Let me be honest about the reason. Gideon is a genuinely excellent operating officer and he is also the most liked person on this property. He remembers everybody’s kids. He does the fundraiser. He is exactly the man I had spent twenty years wishing had been sent to Ordway Yard in 2003 instead of Leland Voss, and I was aware, giving it to him, that I was running a test I would never have admitted to running.
He did it the right way. He went out there. He sat in kitchens. He gave everybody a long runway and he told the truth early and he took the meetings personally, and he did not send anything in an envelope.
We lost three.
Not two. Three, including a conductor with twenty-six years who I would have said was unlosable, and a clerk who took another job the week the first meeting happened because Gideon had told her early and honestly what was coming and she believed him, which was the correct response to being told the truth.
Gideon turned up in my office that fall looking like a man who had been in a car accident.
“I did it the way you’d do it,” he said.
I said he’d done it better than I would have.
“Then why is it worse.” He sat down without being asked, which he does not do. “I’ve got Lurene not speaking to me. I’ve got a crew that thinks I lied to them and I never lied to them once. What did I do wrong?”
I told him he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he looked at me, and neither of us said anything for a while, and then he asked whether the numbers were going to work and I said they were.
The Grip
Broadaxe ran a two-day workshop for the operating officers in 2016 after the second acquisition. It was called leading through change and it was better than that name.
There was a folded card handout, heavy stock, with the grid on the inside — sixteen boxes, four letters apiece, a paragraph under each. We did a straw-bridge exercise at tables and then a debrief about styles. Mine is on the card and I will not put it here, because doing that is a way of asking for something.
Leland’s was not on any card, because Leland did not attend; he was two states over buying a railroad. But I have known that man for thirty years and there is only one box he has ever been in, and after the workshop I read the whole inside of that card in a hotel room, including the part in the fold that nobody reads, which is where the actual content is.
What is printed in that fold is a sequence, and where a habit sits in the sequence is the entire content of the thing. The sequence for this one gets worked out properly on its own page, inside the sixteen this grid comes out of.
The first one does not build toward a conclusion. It starts at the end state and works the railroad backward to where you are standing. You have six units and five are committed, so you’re renting one, for how long — that is not a chain of questions he asked himself in order. He had the end of my proposal before I had finished the first slide, and then he reverse-engineered the two questions that would show it to me fastest.
The second one is what converts it into the world, and it is the whole difference between this man and the neighbor who shares his top habit and delivers through people instead of through mechanisms. Leland’s conclusions come out as an arrangement: a schedule, a plan, an org chart, a plant with the reasons compiled into its structure. What he is aiming at, every time, is the constraint. But a redesigned arrangement is, in the plainest possible terms, a statement that the arrangement it replaces was wrong, and the arrangement it replaces was built by people who are sitting in the room, and there is no version of handing that over that does not carry the indictment inside it. He could not remove it if he tried, and I have watched him try, twice, badly.
And the two at the trailing end of his sequence are precisely the two that could have kept Odell Tunny whole.
One is the accumulated stock of what has actually been done here before and what it felt like when it was done — the institutional memory that a place carries in its body, which contains real information and which he treats, consistently, as sentiment. The other is the live temperature of a room. Not empathy in the abstract; he has more of that than people credit. The real-time thing. Knowing, in the ten or twelve seconds you get, that this is a man somebody has to drive out to.
Now the necessary part, and I am going to be flat about it because I have been on both ends of this. If somebody at your work is correcting you in front of other people, or you are being managed in a way that leaves you humiliated, or you are getting worse assignments after you disagreed with somebody — none of that is a temperament and none of it becomes acceptable because a person is right. Organizations reach for that’s just how he is precisely at the moment when a process is supposed to start, and the sentence works because it sounds like understanding. There are people whose job is to take that: a union rep, an employment lawyer, whoever handles complaints where you work. A card with sixteen boxes printed inside it has no standing in that conversation and cannot be given any, and I have watched this company give it some.
Because that is the other end of it, and it is the end I was on. During the closing remarks the facilitator said, twice, that the instrument was for self-understanding and had no business in selection decisions. He said that people who take the thing a second time a month on come back with a different letter somewhere about a third of the time, and that the continuous scales beneath it behave far more steadily than the boxes do.
Malcolm Deeb was two seats over from me with a printed org chart, writing letters next to names.
The Local to Bracken
The board meets in three weeks and the Bracken recommendation is mine to write.
I have had the file open for a month. I have written the first page five separate times and the versions differ only in how long each one takes to get to the sentence.
The answer is embargo above nineteen, transload at Tullis, put the tie money in the hill. It has been the answer since 2019. It was the answer when I voted against it, and the five years we spent running Leland’s optimized version of a decision he thought was wrong cost us, by my arithmetic, about two and a half million dollars and one derailment that did not hurt anybody.
I presented the outline to the sponsor last week. It went well. Aylward Ostrom told me afterward that I had brought them along really well, which is a true thing about me and has nothing whatever to do with whether the plan is right.
Leland does consulting now, mostly diligence work for two funds, and he is on a plane a great deal for a man with that knee. We talk maybe three times a year. I called him about a car-hire question in the spring and he answered on the second ring and gave me twenty-five minutes and did not once ask what I was doing about Bracken, and I have decided that this was tact and I am aware that I have no evidence for that and that the alternative is that he did not think of it.
The things the sixteen boxes did not cover: he is a serious and knowledgeable birder, which does not fit anything; he was married for twenty-two years to a woman nobody at Broadaxe met more than twice, and that is his business, and it is also a fact about a man that a page of career vocabulary has no purchase on. And he has never, in thirty years, been able to let a small error go by uncorrected — not a consequential one, a small one, a wrong date in somebody’s anecdote at a table — and it is the single thing about him that has done the most damage and it has nothing to do with any constraint anywhere.
Ballast came into the enginehouse in about 2019 and the current one is grey and the one before that was grey, which is the part of the arrangement that makes it work. Somebody buys the food. Who buys it has never been established, and two general managers have gone looking, and there is a shelf inside the door with a bag on it and the bag is never empty. I have decided that this is the single healthiest thing about this company.
I rode the local out to Bracken this week. I do not need to ride the local. I told myself it was about the ties above nineteen.
The conductor is a kid named Sereno, three years on, and somewhere past the fertilizer terminal he asked me whether it was true that they were going to shut the top of the branch.
I said the board would decide in three weeks.
“Right,” he said, and looked out the window, and after a while he said the tie gang had been putting new ties in above nineteen all last month, which I knew, because I had approved it.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.