While there is a lot of crossover between the urban exploration (Urbex) community and the rail enthusiast community, the Ven diagram doesn't quite work the way you think it does as there is both the type of enthusiasm the individual is involves with (rail, urbex or both) and the type of things they explore. When railfans explore rail stuff, they tend to put the resulting content in the rail bin, even if they are also into Urbex. Qualified railfans know the jargon and historical details to properly label their content, rendering it searchable and discoverable. On the other hand, Urbex people who aren't railfans, can get into a lot of interesting rail places, yet have little idea of what they are looking at, therefore harming discovery.
Not so long ago I found some critical WINSLOW tower interior photos from 2003 on an urbex blog site that just hadn't happened to appear on casual google searches until recently. In the same vein, I also found a great exploration of the former PRR MG tower on the famous East Slope between the Horseshoe Curve and the summit at Gallitzin. I routinely search for new "interlocking tower" videos, but not "switch tower" because the genericness of the term returns a lot of bad results. It was only after several years would YouTube searches include this video in my interlocking tower search due to the key words in the comments.
Despite their lack of historical context, the Urbex community can assist the railfan community by being willing to generally take more risks than railfans. In this example MG tower is known to see increased police patrols to the point where the risk of visiting is well known. On the other hand, Urbex folk don't care about getting train photos and can put more effort into not being see in addition to just having more experience in not being seen. Therefore, while railfans steered clear of MG, this guy was able to made a comprehensive video documentation. Another popular urbex assist has been the Hoosac Tunnel in northwestern Massachusetts, which sees both explorers and ghost-hunters occasionally getting some footage of the searchlight signals inside.
Anyway, the next time you are looking for some open source intelligence on some hard to access signaling artifact, try to use some urbex search terms. You might find something surprising.
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