Been saying this for years and nobody listens. The old Severn Valley line near me has had three credible reports in the last eighteen months alone, and when you start mapping these things out the rail corridor pattern is impossible to ignore.
My working theory is its not the lines themselves but what they cut through - old woodland, embankments, forgotten cuttings that haven't seen a human in decades. Perfect liminal territory. Dogman and anything related seems to love that boundary-between-worlds geography, and railway infrastructure creates miles of it in one go.
Anyone else keeping a map of their local sightings? Would be worth overlaying OS maps with the old Beeching cuts specifically, theres about 5,000 miles of abandoned line in Britain that nobody ever walks and I reckon we'd see some very interesting clusters.
