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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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.
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