Interestingly, many mountain railroads didn't get their first rotaries until around 1890...and even then...rotaries only work if the snow isn't deeper than the rotary...so, they used a very high tech snow removal device...a shovel.
Well, it's interesting, yes. But it's also that a workable prototype was not made until the early 1880s, so by the time they got to a point where production was possible, it would have been 1885+...
There are stories in a book I have (
Steam Through Orangeville) about snow north of Orangeville, ON on the CPR where locos were stuck for days, and some of the (sometimes unfortunate) results of fighting snow. One of the more unbelievable is the number of men digging out buried (not just stuck) locos.
Ironically, while it was Orange Jull - an Orangeville resident - that invented the device that was turned into the prototype, the CPR never operated rotaries out of Orangeville. They were mainly reserved for the west/mountains.
Andrew