Spent the better part of 2019 photographing old railway infrastructure around the Black Country and the Midlands generally, partly because of the light and partly because I'd heard the odd report from people local to those areas. Never got anything conclusive on camera but the thermal work I did near the Kingswinford branch line remnants picked up something large moving through the embankment vegetation at 2am that I still can't satisfactorily explain away.
My working theory, for what its worth, is that old rail corridors function as wildlife highways. Dense vegetation, limited human access, often running through land that hasn't been properly surveyed in decades. If something like a dogman exists and is avoiding human contact, that's exactly the kind of terrain it would favour.
Be curious to know if anyone else has cross-referenced sighting clusters with OS maps of disused lines. The pattern I've noticed anecdotally seems too consistent to be coincidence, but I'd want to see proper data before making any strong claims. Anyone actually done that work?