MRL puts on a show and manages multiple mountain grade territories with as much expertise (perhaps even more) as any Class I three times its size. The subtle similarities between their EMDs both old and new (your "flare comparison") is one of the things I've enjoyed most when photographing their Gas Local and Mullan helpers. I've seen more than my share of tonnage moving up 2.2 and 3.0 grades over the past 35 years. But I'll never forget the thrill of being on Mullan back in the summer of 1988 and watching a loaded grain work west through Tobin with two helper sets, cut into the train roughly 1/3 deep and 2/3 deep. All of them ex-BN units, of course, most of them spewing thick plumes of oily exhaust. More recently, summer and winter trips to Mullan with my son gave him his first chance to see coal and grain crawl up the 2.2 with blue MRL power cut in mid-train and a BNSF DPU or two on the rear. For an engineering major at UofI, he was amazed at the physics involved in getting that much weight moving up and over the Continental Divide without breaking a knuckle or stringlining on a curve.