Pushin' Hard! Just a half a mile or so from the beginning of the daunting 4% grade, we find K-36 #488 pushing hard on the tail end of a Rio Grande Freight headed for the 10,000 ft. high Cumbres Pass. Newbies to the narrow gauge often wonder why the railroad spread the locomotives throughout the consist rather than double or triple-head in in a conventional way. The simple answer is that the Lobato and Cascade Trestles on the two approaches to Cumbres Pass were both built back in the 1880s, when locomotives generally weighed a heck of a lot less than the roughly 90 tons of a basic K-36 without tender. As a result these bridges were no longer safe to handle multiple locomotives once the K-series came along. Rather than going through the time-consuming exercise of stopping the train and running one or more locomotives light across the bridges....then recoupling on the other side....the railroad elected to simply spread them out in the consist, so there was never more than one on the bridge at any given time. It was therefore very common to find a road engine on the point, a mid-train helper, and a tail-end pusher, like the 488 seen here. Of course, all trains would typically end with one of the Rio Grande's distinctive wooden cabooses.
