Byron Vincent Henderson, who died July 16 in Colorado Springs at age 51, spent 29 years with the Manitou & Pikes Peak Cog Railway. He was a locomotive engineer and mechanic who understood the railway’s capricious snowplow better than anyone else.
Normally truculent – the cog railway’s website fondly refers to Henderson as an “old grouch” – he treated the snowplow with gruff affection, rather like a ranch hand handles a beloved, if tetchy, working horse.
The snowplow is a singular piece of machinery, built from old locomotive parts and periodically modified.
Like the train, the snowplow relies on a self-contained cog and axle rack system that’s driven by diesel engines tucked on their sides beneath the car. The cog pulls its load up grades ranging from 4 percent to a thrillingly intimidating 25 percent.
Others who drove the snowplow struggled to control the bulky, primeval machine, especially on the notorious Windy Cut section of the railway. Windy Cut’s buffeting gales and changeable weather created concrete-hard banks of snow between 12 and 15 feet deep. Maintenance crews had to use dynamite to loosen the snow enough to let the plow’s 6-foot cutting wheel do its job.
“Byron was very adept at getting through situations that would stonewall other guys,” said railway general manager W. Spencer Wren.
“It used to be our procedure not to plow till spring, so the snow got very hard,” he said. “The last year we did that, a couple other engineers tried to drive the plow and couldn’t. It wasn’t Byron’s job at that time, but he got in the plow, and he got through. He was very proud of getting it done.”
Byron Vincent Henderson was born Oct. 18, 1954, in Owensboro, Ky. His parents held a succession of jobs. His father spent a couple of years working as a section hand, repairing the Manitou & Pikes Peak Cog Railway, when his mother worked as a Manitou Springs waitress and barkeeper.
He was 4 when an Owensboro court order removed him from his parents, who struggled with addiction, and placed him in Naomi Henry’s foster home.
As he grew, Henderson became fascinated with machinery and adept at fixing engines. Like many shade-tree mechanics, he smoked cigarettes almost incessantly, a habit that began at age 10 and never let go. Cigarettes gave him something to do with his hands, and contributed to a taciturn image he didn’t mind cultivating.
“He was a wonderful travel companion,” said railway colleague Steve Stanton. “He talks, but he doesn’t talk too much. I can imagine going from California to New York with him. He was a fairly calm individual. Didn’t really show anger or excitement. People at work would know he was upset because you’d see him flex his jaw.”
Because of Henderson’s innate reticence, few colleagues knew he kept an HO gauge model railroad display at his home on the west side of Colorado Springs.
“It’s on a big, huge board he put on the dining room table, and it takes up almost the whole dining room,” said his wife, Teri.
During his spare time, Henderson embellished the railroad with villages, bridges and tunnels. A few times, in a jocular, experimental mood, he tried unsuccessfully to make the little train collide with a toy car.
“It didn’t work, but he did try,” his wife observed.
None of the sacrificial cars came from the stash of old Hot Wheels cars that Henderson saved from boyhood. The Hot Wheels, kept reverently in one of the home closets, were off- limits to nearly everyone but Henderson’s nephews.
Last October, doctors diagnosed Henderson with lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain. He gave his wife a guilty look.
“I should have listened to you and stopped,” he said.
He died in Teri Henderson’s arms. Her voice was hoarse from alternately crying, cooing and yelling at him.
“I was telling him not to go,” she said. “I told him, ‘Don’t you die on me today!’ Why didn’t he give up those damn cigarettes?”
Besides his wife, survivors include brother William Henderson of Manitou Springs; sisters Sandra Priest of Owensboro, Ky., and Lynn Ottaway of Independence, Ky.; and foster sister Teresa Henry and foster mother Naomi Henry, both of Owensboro. His parents and guardian Jim Henry preceded him in death.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-820-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
