For most people, the highway to Cumbres would indeed be a blessing. Photographing a rotary run (without a UAV or helicopter) is more difficult than most folks might imagine. Depending upon the depth and density of the snow, just moving about can be anything from easy to darn near impossible. At the very least, if a person is not in good physical condition, their activities might be better restricted to the highway, using long lenses and some sort of chase vehicle.
When we did White Pass in 2011, we had a diesel-powered chase train charter to take us to the work area (which was VERY remote), but we did most of the actual chasing on snowshoes. In the mornings, the snow was pretty firm and walking was easy. In the afternoons, the snow got soft and "post-holing" became a serious issue. Post-holing occurs when the snow-pack gives way and you literally fall in up to your shoulders. In that situation, you would be hard-pressed to extracate yourself without help.
When the rotary was attacking 15-20 foot snow drifts, forward progress was very slow, so moving around and shooting different angles was not difficult. The difficulty was finding an angle where you could actually see the thing through all of the smoke and blowing snow. When the snow depths were more manageable for the rotary (2-3ft), it was much easier to get good photographs....but it was a major work-out keeping up with it. Fortunately, the crew would periodically stop and let us catch up. After a couple of hours of furious snowshoeing, the RR folks put us on a bus and we chased by road, which was a welcome respite for many. The combination of chasing on foot and by bus produced a nice variety of shots.
To get an idea what it looked like you can check out the following album of pictures from that event.
White Pass Rotary 2011
To be clear, the White Pass event was done (and paid for) by the railroad for the benefit of crew training. The railroad normally clears the line each spring with bulldozers, but they maintain the rotary as part of their heritage and it is their goal to keep current crewmembers qualified to run it. What we as their guests paid for was the diesel-powered charter, which carried us to and from the work sites. There were only 17 of us who attended and I suspect that was largely due to the cost of getting to Skagway and the fact that a week of vacation was required to do the trip.
/Kevin
