I tried your example, and everything works fine. Apparently the problem is USGS only has limited SDTS formatted coverage. I found that it seems to be very hit and miss in my home state and in southern Washington state. There seems to be full coverage in native format, but not all areas have the SDTS format. I spot checked several places in Oregon and found that even following a rail line in the "earth explorer" window, I could find SDTS format only about half the time. The quick test is that if you only see 3 files pop up in the results, there is no SDTS format for that quad.
I send USGS a message commenting on the lack of coverage and the fact that it is a bit of a pain to have to open the metadata to figure out what format the files are in.
If you open the metadata, and look at the data format type if it is a 3 then it is SDTS, otherwise it is native.
edit, just got a reply to my message, saying that someone will respond in a day... LOL we'll see.
Also been playing around with one of the DLG files I did find, you might add to the tutorial that if the coordinates don't line up, you can close the route file, look at the metadata and see what was used, and set that in view/national coordinate system, then open the file again. In my case the DLG file I downloaded was UTM/NAD27.
Even better might be to look at the metadata and jot down the coordinate system used while you're downloading the files...