It’s a nasty 18 miles of 2.2% from the Columbia River at Beverly up the east slope of the Saddle Mountains to the summit at Boylston--the steepest of the four major mountain ranges encountered on Milwaukee Road’s Puget Sound extension. And while helper engines were required to tame them in the days of electrification, dieselization and the advent of remote-controlled "Locotrol" master/slave units was expected to make helper operations on the Milwaukee Road a thing of the past. But by the summer of 1978, it hasn’t quite worked out that way, as bad trackage has lenghtened schedules and made power tight. The ten pairs of locomotives equipped with "Locotrol" remote equipment isn’t enough to protect the traffic across nearly 800 miles of mountain railroad. So in desolate Beverly, as in Avery, Idaho, and Butte, Montana, the helpers have returned once more.

In the days of electric operations, assignment on the Beverly Helpers was one of the plum jobs on the Coast Division, despite the blazing heat of summer and numbing cold of winter. The crew was paid a full day’s mileage for each train they helped--on busy days with deadfreights and extra sections running, a crew might luck onto three helps, the extra pay making up, to some extent, for the rather primitive living conditions. The heat was best battled with a few minutes respite inside an old de-trucked refrigerator car used to store ice for the engine crews and depot staff. But the main hazard in Beverly--more than the wind, the heat and the cold, were the rattlesnakes which nested under the floorboards of the enginemen’s bunkhouse near the depot, making for any trip outside after dark a bit of an adventure.

With the end of Coast Division electrification in 1972, helper operations ended for a spell, management dictating daily hotshot #261 run "single" whenever possible, four SD40-2’s and a 4000-ton limit eliminating the need for helpers. With the delivery of Locotrol equipment to allow ten master/slave power sets, westbounds out of Othello grew to 4800 tons with a two up front/two cut in SD40-2 setup, and 5600 tons if operated 3/2. Excess westbound tonnage was reduced if needed at Othello, then gathered up in occasional "Kittitas turns" which either operated singly or made two trips across the Saddles (a "Kitty doubler"), depending on the tonnage. Subsequent westbounds would pick this traffic up at Kittitas.With track deteriorating and transit times for trains dramatically increasing, the railroad soon found that ten Locotrol sets weren’t enough. Kittitas turns became more frequent, but management, in an attempt to keep traffic fluid, occasionally would restore the Beverly helpers in times of peak service.