Yeah this is actually something I've been thinking about for a while. There's an old B&O line that runs maybe 4 miles from where I grew up in WV and we had a neighbour who swore he saw something massive and upright near the old rail bridge back in like 2019. Didn't think much of it at the time but I've been going back through sighting databases and the correlation is kind of hard to ignore.
My theory is the rail corridors act as travel routes, same way animals use them for movement between forest patches. If dogman is real and territorial, abandoned lines through dense woodland would make perfect sense as pathways. Less human traffic, overgrown cover, and a lot of these old routes pass through areas that haven't been properly surveyed in decades.
Anyone else got local examples? Would be interesting to actually map this out properly and see if teh pattern holds up across different states.