Express : Server-Side Routing - redirect() and updating header "Location" - redirect

Question

I'm asking this one for the record:
So I have a client making an Ajax call and I'm trying to have the server handle it and redirect the client server-side.
The express docs make it seem res.redirect(path) is going to actually send a response from the server for the client to redirect(re-route).
e.g.
var path = 'http://localhost:8080/newRoute';
res.redirect(path);
//the client will now go to http://localhost:8080/newRoute
But it appears that this only tells the client to make another request to
the url given.(Which seems useless, but that is what my network requests are showing currently).
Many suggest to do the following to do an actual redirect server-side
var path = 'http://localhost:8080/newRoute';
response.writeHead(302, {'Location': path});
response.end();
So does this mean that that we need to change the header in order for the redirect work?
i.e.
res.location('http://localhost:8080/newRoute');
res.redirect('http://localhost:8080/newRoute');
But the above looks horribly redundant and makes res.redirect look like it wasn't intended for server-side redirects to a new page.
Yet the Express docs show an example like this:
res.redirect('http://google.com');
which I don't know how that could be interpreted any other way than "send the client to the page 'http://google.com' ".
Big Question:
So is res.redirect(path) suppose to handle server-side redirects? If not, what do we do?