At one point in the history of 4chan, there was a tradition of dumping pictures of furry art on Fridays. There was a mix of safe for work, but most of the images were mostly not safe for work images. /b/tards were increasingly fed up with this art, and to this day they do. So they had to do something drastic. It would involve a legend of American rail history, the F40PH.
While 1chan.org was the birthplace for this in-joke based on this legend, and they still admire the trains, they took it and use it as a weapon against the increasingly surge of furry art contaminating /b/. They used it to deliberately threadshit on furry threads in 2008, by uploading pictures of the F40PH, as many as they can to reach the image limit on those threads. They did the same thing over and over to each one of those furry threads.
To order to understand why they did the threadshiting you have to look back in 2008 when 4chan was still an anime imageboard. The majority of /b/tards on 4chan looked down upon furries because they didn’t belong on an “anime board” which was /b/. /b/tards still regarded /b/ as a random board for anime and Japanese culture. Even though 4chan never welcomed furry art, they were tolerated on 4chan’s /b/, but it may get you banned by team4chan. But you may be wondering the real question behind this: Why?
WHY NOT?
At the time, they considered the locomotive “awesome”. They considered awesome because it represented not only a symbol of their rebellion against furries, but a symbol of American railroad history.
The F40PH is actually known as the EMD F40PH, or by it’s full term: The GM Electro-Motive Division model F40PH. But many call it the F40PH. These trains were initially developed for use by Amtrak because their previous “fleet of trains before the F40PH were not reliable in passenger service.” (http://www.american-rails.com/emd-f40ph.html) The F40PH provided the reliability that Amtrak needed, and as a result bought more than 200 units for their services. As a matter of fact, they’re so reliable that many commuter rail agencies in the United States purchased them for their use.
The locomotive set the standard for what diesel trains should work and look like. The most major thing you will see on a F40PH is their “distinctive, utilitarian appearance” (http://www.trainweb.org/asamtrak911/proto/f40ph.html) This appearance gave them a symbol for Amtrak. This symbol has represented Amtrak from 1970s to the 2000s
To this day they remain relatively common in train services. But not only in commuter rail services you will see the trains but there are just plenty of these units remain on service on “various tourist and freight railroads” such as CSX, the Gran Canyon Railway and the Ski Train. (see wikipedia). VIA, MBTA, Tri-Rail, CalTrain, NJ Transit, Metra, Metrolink also have these types of trains for their use.
Even though Furry Friday may have effectively been returned to its place, despite being replaced by F40PH Fridays in 2008. It’s still recognized as a place in American railroad and Western imageboard history.
Ndee “Jkid” Okeh (YSJkid@gmail.com)