Blimey, now that you mention it - there's definitely something to the railway corridor theory that keeps nagging at me.
My main thing is EVP work rather than cryptid hunting, but I did a solo session near the old Woodhead Line ruins in the Peak District last autumn and genuinely felt watched the entire night. Nothing on the Zoom H5 that I could identify as a Dogman vocally, but there were these low-frequency rumbles my mics picked up that didn't match any wildlife I know of. Big, deliberate, close.
A few thoughts on why old rail lines might be hotspots worth discussing:
Linear corridors - abandoned tracks create natural travel routes through otherwise dense terrain, same reason deer and foxes use them, Liminal spaces - there's a solid argument that structurally ". In-between". Locations (tunnels, embankments, overgrown stations) attract something, whether that's cryptids or stranger phenomena altogether, Human activity history - decades of workers, camps, tragic deaths... the energy accumulates, whatever your theory on why that matters
The Woodhead tunnels specifically have an absolutely mental history of deaths during construction. Whether that's relevant to Dogman activity or whether I'm just pattern-matching after too many late nights, genuinely couldn't tell you.
Has anyone cross-referenced sighting coordinates with old OS maps showing Victorian-era rail infrastructure? Feels like exactly the kind of data project this community should be doing rather than just swapping anecdotes - not that the anecdotes aren't brilliant, keep them coming.
What regions are people actually seeing these reports cluster in?