I was getting ready for bed Sunday night when I got a call- not an automated call but from a live person. There was a problem with the system. I was called to be a brakemanon the helpers. The person couldn't thell me much more. On duty time was 10:01 pm. I went to the depot and called the dispatcher. She sounded new. She said that we were to relieve the crew on a set of helpers that was alerady pushing a train. They were near Homer and going to Barstow. She said they needed a helper because the train needed an ETD. I said, "Well, why don't they just hang an ETD on it?" She couldn't answer that. We were to push the train all of the way to Barstow and then come back "light power" to Needles. The crew on the helpers were going to be DOL at 2 am. The crew on the train was ging DOL at 1:45 am. We were told to get on the train at Amboy. They asked my engineer to sign the cards on the middle DPs of another train. The we got on our helpers. We found out that our train had two dead motors, which is why it actually needed helpers. The lead motor could not communicate with the DP. The crew of the train was swapped out with another van. There was an ETD on the last coupler of the train. The red light kept flashing. We pushed the train to Barstow. The sun was up by he time we got there. They told the train to "hold back for one." They were going to put another motor on it. I cut us away form the train and hooked the air hose to the ETD. We ony had abut 3 and half hours left, so we told the dispatcher that we did not have enough time to make it to Needles and they should call a dog catch crew. If they had ran us all of the way, we might have made it, but they put us behind an H train. Whe we went thrugh Cadiz it looked like we weren't going to make it. We asked the dsiptacher if there was a dog catch crew on the way. She told us to ut our power in the pur at Fenner. When we got ther eanoth renginer toold us over the radio, "You can't put your train in there. The switch doesn't have an electronic lock." My engineer looked it up in the rule book. Because we had a train symbol we couldn't put our power in there. We had lost precious time by stopping there. The dispatcher told us t go between switches at Goff. For sme reason they crossed us over to Main One. We stopped and went DOL between switches at Goffs. We saw that a dog catch crew had been called but they would not be on duty for another 90 minutes. A train pulled up with a 3 man crew. They were on their way to Cadiz to take a train outof the siding, but they would "baby sit" our helpers until the dog catch crew showed up. The van took us to Needles. I claimed 341 miles for the round trip to Barstow and an RO (130 miles) because helpers aren't supposed to go all of the way to Barstow. It will be interesting to see if they deny it. It was after noon and I had been up all night I was exhausted. I'm not showing out in the next 24 hours.