Fascinating thread. I'm primarily a crop circle researcher based in Sussex, so Dogman isn't my usual territory, but the infrastructure correlation angle genuinely interests me from a pattern-analysis perspective.
What strikes me is that old rail corridors share several characteristics with the kind of locations that repeatedly generate anomalous reports of various kinds - they're linear disturbances cutting through otherwise undisturbed land, often following older routes (drovers' paths, ley alignments), and they create consistent wildlife corridors. Whether you're talking Dogman, Black Dogs, or frankly some of the more unusual ground-level phenomena I've documented near Wiltshire formations, the geography of the strange tends to cluster along these transitional zones.
A few questions worth putting to the group:
Are the sightings concentrated near active lines, disused lines, or both?, Any correlation with tunnels or cuttings specifically? The geology changes dramatically at those points, What time of year are these encounters occurring?
I'd also gently push back on purely mundane explanations here. Yes, large dogs and misidentification are always on the table, but the consistency of the bipedal gait descriptions across completely independent witnesses in different counties deserves serious attention rather than dismissal.
Has anyone done systematic mapping of these reports against OS grid references? That's the kind of rigorous spatial analysis that separates pattern from coincidence. Would be very interested to see overlays against pre-Beeching rail closures specifically - those corridors have been sitting undisturbed for sixty-odd years now.