Interesting pattern actually. I don't follow Dogman reports as closely as I do abduction accounts but I've noticed a few researchers flagging this correlation over the past couple of years. My question would be whether the railroad proximity is genuinely meaningful or just a byproduct of the fact that old rail lines tend to cut through remote woodland anyway - so you'd expect higher sightings near them just because of terrain rather than anything specific to the lines themselves.
Is anyone mapping these properly? Like with actual coordinates and distances from the nearest track? Because anecdotal clustering is one thing but if someone's done a proper spatial analysis that would change how seriously I'd take the pattern. There's a bloke on YouTube who covered something similar but he wasn't rigorous about it at all.
Also wondering if there's a UK angle here. We have plenty of disused railway lines through isolated areas - the old Beeching cuts especially. Has anyone logged anything from this side of the Atlantic?