Came across this pattern myself actually after going back through a load of witness reports last year. There does seem to be something to it - not just Dogman either, a lot of Bigfoot encounters cluster around old rail corridors too. My working theory is that the rail lines follow natural terrain features, valleys and ridgelines mostly, which are the same routes large animals would naturally use for travel. So maybe the correlation isn't the rails themselves but the geography underneath them.
What I'd want to know is whether anyone has checked if the sightings concentrate near active lines, abandoned ones, or both. Because if its abandoned lines specifically that changes the theory a bit - less human traffic, more overgrowth, basically a wildlife corridor at that point.
Has anyone actually mapped this out properly or is it still mostly anecdotal? Feels like someone with GIS skills and access to the BFRO database could do something interesting here. Would love to see actual distribution data rather than just individual reports.