Oh heck yes. Railroads had and still have helper districts in the steam and diesel era. In areas over grades there would be sidings helper pockets where they’d be staged to do just that. They’d couple on the rear and shove up the hill, and return “light” back down…all day long. This is useful because even though the use of radio controlled ‘DPU’ ( distributed power ) helpers on the rear ( and mid train sometimes as well ) have become the norm now, some RRs may find using manned helpers over relatively shorter distances so as not to waste locomotives along the rest of the route that doesn’t require extra power.
That is exactly what happens here, Livingston MT–and in fact it’s a basic reason for the town’s existence. Every westbound train (except short ones with very light loads, like those hauling just a few 737 fuselages I mentioned above) stops to have two or more pushers (I think technically they’re called ‘helpers’) hooked up in back to help the train over the first serious terrain they’ll encounter, the aforementioned Bozeman Pass–everything due east of here is at river grade, which trains take in stride. Once over the pass the helpers are detached (someone told me once that they will often do this on the fly but I’m not sure I buy that) they come back over the pass to Livingston to await the next train.
That’s really cool!
So how come this isn’t just a standard practice everywhere? Costs, I assume? The grade has to be steep enough and often-used enough to justify having a helper “station” (or whole town) built up around it?
There are other reasons for Livingston MT’s being located where it is, but they’re all RR related:
hook up helpers to push over the first chunk of the Rockies
location for the now defunct tourist branch line to Yellowstone Nat’l Park (that’s why the depot here is so nice)
halfway between Seattle and St Paul is a good spot for a major shop complex
To use helpers you need a short steep segment on a line where fewer engines suffice for everywhere else. And by short I mean in time versus the length of a helper crew’s duty day. And with little enough traffic (or be double-tracked), so the helper can get back down to the bottom without impeding the next train coming along uphill.
Now that a 2-man crew can operate a 10-locomotive train with dispersed power, it can be cheaper to drag the unmanned unneeded locomotives some good distance on the flat-ish terrain rather than taking time and a second crew to stop the train, connect the helpers, and operate the helpers up & back down. If / When uncrewed locomotives become the norm, the economics will change again.
But right now avoiding labor costs is a huge driver of management behavior. Even if it’s not cheapest, it feels that way. Headcount is an enemy in and of itself. You see that in your own industry.
Fair points, but also, I wonder if that just means the pushers themselves will one day be automated? Build a secondary track next to the main one, have the pushers be remotely or self-driven, just charging and waiting for the next train to come by.
A retired railroad man here once told me that it would be trivial (“they could do it tomorrow if they had to” he said) to completely automate all aspects of train operation, and that the only thing stopping that from happening is railroad workers’ unions. (Not a knock on unions, just repeating what I was told.)
I checked and found that Storms can drop several inches to well over a foot of snow at pass level, with higher mountain elevations often accumulating 12 to 24 inches or more during major winter systems. So what effect, if any does this have on the trains?
In the US, when snow gets deep enough, the trains stop. In Canada, they send a plow train through to clear the tracks.
In Montana ( Marias Pass ), and the Sierras of northern California ( and there may be others ) some railroads had/have sections of “snow sheds” that cover the RR right of way in areas where snow accumluations or chance of snow slides are high. They had miles of this stuff.