The General response

The cinematography Keaton utilized helped to showcase his unique, frantic and acrobatic style of slapstick comedy as it placed him on speeding trains with a lot of moving around in tight places. He was able to use his height to swiftly maneuver throughout the train while seemingly accidentally falling into doing the right thing, but only rarely did it work the way he planned. Also, the tracks he was able to use in Oregon, as the movie necessitated parallel tracks, were an immense complement to the story and his comedy, specifically the ability to show close-up shots of "the great stone face". When he thinks he got rid of the car in front of him, only to have it reappear and there is a wonderful shot of him just staring blankly out the engine car and then to have it happen again just a couple minutes later when the car derails, create those priceless shots that made Buster Keaton who he was and his comedy what it was.
When compared with the short films we saw and other movies from the birth of cinema, this film has exponentially progressed within the 20 or so years since. When simply looking at the different ways in which color is utilized i.e. when night falls and a downpour occurs, there is a heavy tinge of dark blue tonally different from the rest of the film as it was shot in the more usual visage of black and white and this helps create a sense of suspense as he tries to rescue Annabel Lee. This can also be seen in the colors of the uniforms as the Union wore dark blue and the Confederacy wore lighter grays. And since this movie has the confederates as the heroes they are shown in the lighter sense defeating the darker broods of the North.
It truly was a triumph of cinema and Buster Keaton is simply fantastic.