Live close to railroad tracks constantly see cars being pulled with one engine forward and one backward. The one that really stumped me yesterday, was a train that started with 5 engines in the following orientation: forward, backward, forward, forward, backward
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Train engines work just as well forward as backwards. Cars are difficult to steer backwards due it the adjustable wheels being at the front and the seats facing that way, but trains just follow the tracks and only the front one needs someone looking forward. They control all the power.
Cars have slower reverse gears because you don’t drive at high speed backwards. Trains don’t have that kind of gearing.
Trains are also very hard to turn around. You might as well just hook them up facing whatever direction they are already oriented in.
Simply put, the locomotives at both ends are so the train can be operated from both ends without having to physically move the locomotive from one end to the other in order to drive it backwards. Increasing the amount of locomotives increases the available power capacity, meaning longer and heavier trains.
Train engines can run in both directions.
What you observed was either stacking multiple engines to move a really heaving train.
Or moving the engines itself from point A to B for whatever reason, that is done by with one engine active for saving fuel.
The Orientation of the engines doesn’t matter in both of the cases, they are just connected together the way they are set on the rails currently as you can’t turn an train around that easy
Almost all freight locomotives in North America are Diesel-Electric. Instead of powering the wheels from a transmission, like in a gas powered car, the diesel engines generate electricity to power electric motors that move the train. One huge advantage, electric motors can run forwards or backwards with the same power and efficiency.
Why do they point in different directions? Well….it’s hard to turn a locomotive around. That is a part of it, whatever way they were coming down the track, that’s how they get hooked up. Alternating arrangements mean that the operator can be forward facing regardless of direction of travel, and stacking extra locomotives in alternating pairs means that you can easily reconfigure them based on load and requirements without having to try to get them to a turntable to rotate.
All the others are completely wrong. The direction the locomotives face has nothing to do with the direction they can travel. Long trains have engines on both end for slack management. Think of the train as a rope being pulled along a groove. As you pull it around a curve, the rope wants to straighten out and if the back of the rope is hard enough to pull, the rope will pop out of the groove. If you pull the rope downhill, the back wants to push the rope and it can push the rope out of the groove. If you can push and pull on both ends of the rope independently, you can control how much they pull on each other or want to scrunch up in the middle to prevent it from popping out of the groove.
Locomotives are hooked up in whatever direction they happen to face. But you always want the front engine facing forward of course, and it’s ideal to have the last engine facing backwards. This allows the train to be ran back the other direction at the end of the line without having to turn the train around. The driver simply switched to the rear engine and now it’s the front of the train. My source is my grandfather who has worked the railroad since before the steam engines were retired.
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