Train pictures are usually more of a rail enthusiast thing – and although that isn’t the focus of our blog, I certainly don’t mind serving up a train photo or two for our crossover readers.

(Warning – as some of these links which follow are to unmoderated Usenet content, some may be Not Safe For Work (NSFW).)

Actually, instead of just a train picture or two – how about I give you a peek at the largest collection of train pictures on the internet you’ve probably never seen?

Unless you are a true Internet geek from back in the day, or a hardcore file sharer, movie downloader, or, um, like porn, you have probably never heard of The Usenet or its history.

Which is too bad, because the Usenet has been around well before you took your first baby steps with Netscape (and actually had its own special Usenet newsreader distributed with ‘Netscape Communicator’ (yikes – remember Netscape Communicator? I used to even use that for Email!). Its a part of Internet history everyone should know about.

Without going into a lot of Usenet’s growing pains, suffice it to say that it was the original internet discussion group server. Its discussion groups – called ‘usenet newsgroups’ number in the tens of thousands, and participants in the millions worldwide.

However, although there are so many groups, the traffic has traditionally skewed itself into some very specific areas.

First is the techy groups, especially comp.os.linux.misc, comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.lang.c, where old-school programming gurus share their craft. Personally, I don’t think I would have ever mastered Perl without the friendly tutorage I found from the gurus in comp.lang.perl.misc.

Another skew is huge music, movies, and software downloads. Usenet is a popular place for pirates to drop their booty, and even more popular for others to pick it up. Although it can be tricky to use (it requires an NNTP account, newsreader software, and preferably some nzb search engines and maybe even a special archiver), it has the advantage that, unlike peer to peer, most anti-piracy companies cannot spy on your downloading – its pretty much between you and the NNTP provider.

The next niche is pictures, which is kind interesting. Of course, like basically any other uncensored user-submitted image service, 99% of usenet is adult newsgroups with pictures and video.

I’ll wait here and eat my lunch while you finish checking out those last links. Back already? Great, lets continue.

Besides adult content, there is indeed a (relatively) great deal of traffic in some other less steamy usenet pictures newsgroups. The top non-adult usenet image groups by traffic include comics/anime, desktop wallpaper, and lastly transportation photos – namely, the alt.binaries,pictures.autos, alt.binaries.pictures.rail, and alt.binaries.pictures.railroad groups. (Dont ask me why they split these last two, although I got in trouble with an MTA conductor once for taking pictures of train tracks instead of trains, so I guess there is some semantics there)

I have no idea why out of all the photo subjects in the world these groups are so popular, but they are. People have been posting their pictures of trains to alt.binaries.pictures.rail for well over a decade.

The best way to check out these photos is through usenetbinaries.com, which is a Usenet NNTP provider but also has thumbnail galleries for easily browsing Usenet groups with images and a flash video feature for viewing H.264 MPEG4 usenet video YouTube-style. alt.binaries.pictures.rail is one of the groups they let people browse the full size images for free, which is great.

Probably the best feature of the usenet rail newsgroups over other web-based galleries is that there has always been something new to see there, every day, for over 10 years. You cant beat that.

So enjoy!