Dartmoor doesn't have many old railway lines but the ones we do have - Princetown branch, Haytor Granite Tramway - absolutely tick every box for liminal, wrongness-feeling locations that cryptid activity clusters around.
The railway-as-corridor theory makes technical sense to me. You've got:
Linear clearings through dense terrain (easier transit for large bipedals), Abandoned infrastructure = minimal human disturbance, Consistent ley-adjacent geography in a lot of documented cases
I've been cross-referencing the BFRO database against historical OS maps and there's a pattern that's hard to dismiss as coincidence - though obviously correlation isn't causation, before anyone starts.
My Bushnell trail cams near an old tramway cutting have picked up something large on three separate occasions this winter. Gait analysis on the footage rules out deer, rules out fox, rules out the usual suspects. Whether that's Dogman-adjacent or just an unusually massive feral dog is still open.
What's interesting is whether the railways attract them or whether they were already using those exact routes before the lines got built - humans have a habit of constructing infrastructure along pre-existing natural transit corridors.
Anyone else actually mapping this systematically rather than just collecting anecdotes?