Russia’s trainspotters have spent years documenting the country’s railways. Amid the war, their hobby has put them in the crosshairs of the security services.

On October 14, a Moscow court ordered the arrest of Denis Eskov, 35, and Anatoly Nagornov, 40, the administrators of RailGallery, a photo website devoted to railroads. According to investigators, they illegally accessed certain data and published it on RailGallery. What that information was has not been disclosed. Eskov and Nagornov face five to ten years in prison. Photographs of special trains — including Vladimir Putin’s armored train, the subject of a 2023 investigation by the Russian investigative outlet Dossier Center — have repeatedly appeared on RailGallery and other similar sites.Bereg, a cooperative of independent journalists, explains how the community of railroad enthusiasts works and what is known about the arrest of Denis Eskov and Anatoly Nagornov. Meduza is publishing this piece in full.What is known about the Eskov and Nagornov caseThe case against Denis Eskov and Anatoly Nagornov centers on accusations of “unlawful interference with critical information infrastructure.” Investigators say the RailGallery administrators illegally accessed data, copied it, and posted it on their site.The Joint Press Service of Moscow Courts has not said which organization investigators consider the victim, or what exactly the defendants published. The statute under which Eskov and Nagornov are charged states that their actions caused “serious consequences,” though what those consequences were remains unexplained.The Joint Press Service of Moscow Courts did not respond to Bereg’s request for comment.The anonymous Russian Telegram channel VChK-OGPU links the charges against Eskov and Nagornov to their use of ASUT, a computer system Russian Railways, the Russian state rail operator, uses to manage locomotives and other resources that keep trains running. Dispatchers and depot staff use ASUT to see where a specific locomotive is located and to plan the work of train drivers.Eskov and Nagornov needed access to ASUT to track locomotives that interested them and tell photographers where to find them, according to VChK-OGPU. The resulting photographs were then posted on the site. Three sources in the RailGallery community told Bereg that the archive was expanded this way, among other methods.Yegor (name changed), an acquaintance of Anatoly Nagornov, told Bereg that both administrators had access to ASUT because they worked for organizations affiliated with Russian Railways. Leaked data reviewed by Bereg shows that Nagornov was listed in 2022 as deputy head of a Russian Railways road electrical engineering laboratory, while Eskov’s employer as of 2020 was JSC NII Stali. Yegor does not rule out that Russian Railways’ information security service could have detected signs that data had been copied from the system.He also suggested that someone may have reported Eskov and Nagornov to the authorities: “A couple of times, comments appeared on the site saying that railroads are a strategic site, and, like, what are you doing filming here.”The RailGallery website stopped loading the day after Eskov and Nagornov were detained. A statement from the photo site’s team appeared on the transportation-focused Telegram channel Sheridan TV, saying the administrators’ detention came as a “complete surprise” to the site’s members. RailGallery representatives did not say whether the site would continue operating.Sheridan TV subscribers speculated that Eskov and Nagornov’s arrest might be tied to photographs of Vladimir Putin’s armored train stored on RailGallery. “I read somewhere that they photographed Putin’s secret train from the FBK investigations or something like that,” one user wrote.What the railroad enthusiast community does, and which trains interest itRailroad enthusiast photographers, also known as trainspotters, photograph not only unusual locomotives but also perfectly ordinary trains, chasing a particular railcar model, train number, or route.As a rule, railroad enthusiasts are interested in:rare locomotives and railcars (for example, prototype units, unusual modifications, vehicles with unique paint schemes, or units soon to be decommissioned)new trains or, conversely, historic equipmentspecial trains, such as government trains and armored trainsordinary trains photographed for sites like RailGallery, even if the trains themselves are unremarkable.The authors of the Telegram channel Magistral. Kuvalda (Main Line. Sledgehammer) told Bereg why it is important for train photographers to know every detail about a train:For many railroad enthusiasts, every locomotive is its own distinct creature. Even machines of the same series differ in technical condition, degree of wear, blemishes or flaws in their paint, and distinctive sounds. A number helps identify a locomotive, and news of its transfer to another depot is not a trade secret for a fan but a “fragment of fate” for this inanimate yet beloved and fascinating traction beast.Nagornov’s acquaintance Yegor told Bereg that data on a locomotive’s location and condition is needed not only to plan photo shoots but also to compile the detailed description that accompanies each photograph.“You can track which locomotives were in service at a given depot at what time, look at the production history of a specific model by year, find out which plants repaired the train, and so on,” he said.“The desire to know more than others is a natural character trait of any transportation fan,” the authors of the Magistral. Kuvalda channel wrote after Denis Eskov and Anatoly Nagornov were detained.How Putin’s train ended up in the lens of a Russian trainspotterA photograph of an unremarkable train — a typical diesel locomotive and cars in Russian Railways’ signature silver-and-red livery, traveling through a forest in the Novgorod region toward Valdai — first appeared on the Rutrain website in 2018. Rutrain was one of several sites where railroad enthusiasts posted photographs before RailGallery existed.Mikhail Korotkov, who took the photo, said he was struck by the closed curtains, behind which, in his view, “darkness and decay were hidden.”“The train itself radiates anxiety and incredible longing. In my case, I was lucky that there were not four locomotives, but one, and that the person riding the train was, accordingly, four ranks below the most frightening person in this country,” Korotkov wrote in the caption to the photo on the Rutrain website.More than one locomotive is needed to haul armored cars, as in the train Korotkov photographed, journalist Ilya Rozhdestvensky, who investigated the train, told Bereg. The armor adds weight, so hauling the cars requires reinforced wheelsets, like those used on freight cars, and multiple locomotives.Asked by Bereg why the train made such an impression on him, Korotkov said it was the first time he had seen a special train with his own eyes.On Rutrain, Korotkov also posted photographs of other mysterious trains. In one shot taken in 2021 in the Moscow region, the train is pulled by two locomotives, and the cars’ roofs are covered with protective coverings shielding equipment from precipitation and damage (journalists later determined that special-communications radio antennas were hidden underneath them).In the caption to the photograph, Korotkov said the “ghost train” did not appear “in the schedules or in Russian Railways’ systems,” and that its locomotives had neither numbers nor identifying marks. He also said the train “tore along like mad,” and “all the other scheduled trains made way for it.”Korotkov told Bereg he checked whether tickets were available for trains whose numbers he saw on the windows, using the Express-3 system. If no tickets were available, he assumed it was a special train. In his view, fake numbers are used for concealment.Korotkov’s photograph ended up in an investigation by the Russian investigative outlet Dossier Center in 2023. In it, journalists described in detail the armored train the president began using regularly shortly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin prefers railroads, according to Dossier Center, because trains, unlike planes, are difficult to track through publicly available services. The Kremlin said Putin “neither owns nor uses” this train.In 2023, Korotkov gave an interview to The Washington Post, by which time he had already left Russia. He had suspected since 2021 that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) was surveilling him: verbatim transcripts of private phone conversations with a friend appeared in the comments under his YouTube videos, he told The Washington Post. Fearing mobilization, the photographer left for Kazakhstan in the fall of 2022, then for Sri Lanka. He now travels around Asia and runs a YouTube channel.Korotkov told The Washington Post that other railroad enthusiasts helped him track the train believed to be Putin’s, telling him when it would leave Moscow so he could go photograph it.Asked why he believed these people, Korotkov says he had heard a great deal about “Putin’s train” and wanted a rare shot for his collection.Korotkov tells Bereg that he never had access to internal corporate information systems and that he always got data on train movements from open sources. “There was no one to share internal information with me: it wasn’t published in the chats, or maybe I just didn’t notice it and chalked it up to user observations,” the photographer told Bereg.Even train drivers talked about unusual trains on social media, sharing information in chats on VK and Telegram, according to Korotkov. “Although, as far as I could see, after Eskov and Nagornov’s arrest, all channels like that stopped posting updates or were deleted outright by their creators to avoid problems,” Korotkov added.In the caption to the 2018 photo, Korotkov said he did not feel safe after taking the shot. “Ordinary mortals don’t ride a train like this. An ordinary person who ends up within these walls turns into mincemeat. And so does anyone who takes this train into the viewfinder of their camera,” he added.“So scary you shot it twice?” a user called Vosskuez commented on the photo that same year, 2018. Korotkov told Bereg that after the train passed the first time, he stayed and waited for it to return so he could photograph it again — those were the two passes the commenter meant.The Vosskuez account on Rutrain was registered to Denis Eskov, one of RailGallery’s administrators and founders. A member of the RailGallery community who agreed to speak to Bereg anonymously said Eskov always strove to be the first to photograph a new or rare train. Because of this, some enthusiasts considered him an “upstart” and “disliked” him, the source told Bereg.How Eskov and Nagornov created the largest website for railroad enthusiastsBefore RailGallery, the TrainPix website was one of the main gathering places for Russian-speaking train enthusiasts. It operated from 2009 until February 2022, when a message in English appeared on its emptied-out homepage: “This site was created by Ukrainians. And now, when Ukraine is under attack by Russians, I have decided to close it.” The same page linked to a site for donating to the Ukrainian armed forces. It is unclear who wrote the message. TrainPix’s creators were Alexei Kalinin and users known by the usernames SergG, Alien89, and Siroger.Anatoly Nagornov, one of the arrested RailGallery administrators, was an “admin or editor” on TrainPix, according to Mikhail (name changed), one of his acquaintances. On TrainPix, Nagornov’s name appeared on the list of comment moderators.After TrainPix closed, “a certain vacuum formed in the area of railroad photography” on the Russian-language internet, Mikhail continues. He says similar sites “did not combine both a photo gallery and a database of rolling stock.”Nagornov and other railroad enthusiasts set out to rebuild the TrainPix archive. By the end of 2022, the RailGallery site they had launched held 194,000 photographs; by October 2026, it had more than 324,000 photographs and 22,500 user profiles. Most TrainPix members moved to RailGallery, according to Mikhail.Nagornov and Eskov were listed as the new site’s creators. Both had spent years collecting photographs of rare trains, and they had both built large photo archives on their VKontakte pages. Eskov’s profile contains hundreds of photographs of railroads and trains from Europe, Asia, and even Africa, as well as dozens of subscriptions to railroad-themed social media pages — perhaps the only recognizable one is designer Artemy Lebedev’s page.Nagornov also ran a YouTube channel devoted to trains. He posted one video with the comment: “We’re not crazy, we’re train freaks.”Yulia Izmailova, Nagornov’s ex-wife, tells Bereg that RailGallery’s founders had “disagreements that turned into battles in the comments.” In the railroad fan community, she explains, there are constantly “some kind of disputes, wars, there are favorites, there are people who aren’t liked.” “But apparently [Eskov and Nagornov] banded together to create this site,” Izmailova suggests.After the divorce, she remained friends with Anatoly. Izmailova says she “still hasn’t recovered” from the news of his arrest. She describes him as a “kind, sociable, and caring” person: “He was always ready to help. Once, early in our relationship, I urgently needed to have a tooth treated, and he sold his camera to help me with the money.”Like Nagornov, Izmailova likes railroads, and their shared interest brought them together on social media in the mid-2010s. “At the time, I was one of the few girls who were into railroads,” Yulia adds. The couple married in 2018 and stayed married for a year.Nagornov and Izmailova, she says, began going on “hunts for rare trains” together. She includes in that category branded trains and old locomotives, “of which only a handful remain, and every time one makes it into a shot is a stroke of luck.”“Some people, including Tolya, just like photographing everything indiscriminately and tracking how the paint job on a given train changes. Or which depot it’s assigned to,” Izmailova adds. “That seemed like nerdy obsessiveness to me, so I didn’t understand him on that score.”She herself loved “the romance of train travel, the lights of signal lamps, and the smell of coal smoke.” “Trains, regardless of their numbers or models, interest me, and in any new country I immediately look for the railroad,” adds Yulia, who left Russia after the start of the full-scale war.The RailGallery community later gained access to a database that made it possible to track locomotives in real time. Izmailova “heard from several people that it was called ASUT.” “I don’t know how they got access, because I wasn’t in touch [with Nagornov] at the time,” she says.Access to the database made it easier to photograph the trains they wanted, but the shoots regularly provoked irritation from station staff and train drivers, Izmailova says. In the best case, she says, photo enthusiasts received rude gestures from the drivers of passing trains.In the worst case, railroad employees caught them. Yulia ran into complaints more than once, though she never understood the reasons. “They would usually take you to the security office or the transport police. There, they might draw up a report or issue a fine,” she says. Photographers were prepared for consequences like that, but Izmailova could not imagine the hobby leading to a criminal case.Why photographs of trains and data on train movements matter to more than just the trainspotting communityEven when a train in a RailGallery photograph is barely distinguishable from the landscape, its caption may list the exact locomotive number — information nearly impossible to read with the naked eye, whether from a moving train or a photograph. Railroad enthusiasts obtain this information from databases like ASUT.The information stored in these systems also interests OSINT investigators. A railcar’s number can be used to trace its route, allowing investigators to determine where military equipment is being moved, for example. This is exactly how investigators at Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) operated even before Russia’s full-scale invasion began.In December 2021, CIT reported that it and another group of investigators had lost access to the commercial service GdeVagon, which made it possible to track railcars and freight containers by number. Using the service, journalists had previously checked the route of a train carrying Tigr armored vehicles, KamAZ trucks, and Ural trucks, which had traveled from Abakan to Yelnya, where equipment of the 41st Combined Arms Army was stationed. Russia was massing troops near the Ukrainian border at the time.Photographing railroads is difficult, but train enthusiasts consider the resulting photographs worth the risk. “In Soviet times there were strict rules on this, since [the railroad] was considered a strategic facility back then. That’s why there are few photographs of Soviet railroads, and they’re valued,” Izmailova explains.In today’s Russia, the rules are less clear-cut. By law, nothing prohibits photographing railway terminals, stations, tracks, or platforms, as long as it does not cause inconvenience or create a dangerous situation.At the same time, Russian Railways classifies certain railroad facilities and trains as “information constituting a state secret” and prohibits photographing “special, military, and specially designated trains.”Which Russians have already faced prosecution for their love of railroadsRailroad enthusiasts used to commonly share information about places where they risked running into security guards or a locomotive crew who might radio in about outsiders near the tracks, Nagornov’s friend Yegor tells Bereg.The situation changed after the full-scale war began: train fans now discuss the detentions of fellow enthusiasts and Russians accused of sabotage more often than good spots for photography, Yulia Izmailova says.In 2023, the Russian Telegram news channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported that Russian Railways security officers had caught a 21-year-old blogger named Valery (journalists did not give his last name) photographing trains and commuter trains near tracks leading to a military facility of the Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate outside Moscow.Russian Railways’ security service saw in Valery’s actions “an unhealthy interest in facilities involved, among other things, in transporting military cargo.” During a search, officers found photographs of trains, stations, and tracks along the Kursk line in his possession. Valery had also posted photos and videos of trains on Instagram.Russian Railways’ security service asked police to determine whether the blogger had ties to “extremist organizations” and had previously planned sabotage on the railroads. An anonymous source close to Valery told Bereg that police released him after he gave a statement. Valery did not respond to Bereg’s messages.A year later, police in Murmansk detained Erik Binkley, a 34-year-old German citizen who was photographing trains in a passenger car storage yard. A security guard called police, who handed Binkley over to FSB officers. His fate since then is unknown.St. Petersburg police suspected 12 people of trading in Russian Railways data that same year, 2024. According to the Interior Ministry, current and former employees of the state company’s information and computing center, along with accomplices, had for years sold information about freight train routes, including to foreign clients. Of the 12 suspects, police detained four, and investigators opened a criminal case against them over illegal access to computer information.In September 2025, prosecutors reported that a case against seven people had been sent to court: four employees of an unnamed commercial organization and three employees of the St. Petersburg information and computing center of Russian Railways. The Interior Ministry did not say whether the case was connected to the one opened in 2024.Alexander Rodionov, one of the railroad fans, was charged with “justifying terrorism” in July 2026 over comments on an unnamed social network. Investigators said Rodionov supported arson attacks on Russian Railways facilities and collected non-public information about the company.In a VK post about the arson of an electric train at a St. Petersburg depot in February 2026, Rodionov wrote that, “fortunately,” the commuter train that burned was one that, in his view, “belonged in a junkyard anyway.” It is unknown whether the “justifying terrorism” charge stems specifically from this post.Train enthusiasts also draw suspicion from security officials outside Russia. On October 30, Polish police reported detaining a 55-year-old Russian citizen in the city of Świdnica. Police said they spotted his car near a railroad crossing, and the driver drove off after noticing the patrol. He was soon found near a railroad viaduct and detained.According to investigators, he had been photographing infrastructure and industrial facilities in Poland to pass the images to Russian intelligence. He was charged with espionage and ordered held for three months. He faces at least five years in prison.Ksenia Sukhorukova, an employee of Channel One, a Russian state-controlled television channel, later said on Facebook that the detained man was her brother, Alexander Mashovets. She said he had traveled to Poland on a business trip and had been photographing trains since childhood. “This is his hobby, not some secret activity,” Sukhorukova wrote.Mashovets’s Instagram account indeed contains many photographs of trains, planes, trolleybuses, and other forms of transportation. He has more than 5,000 followers and has published more than 2,000 posts, some taken in Germany, Estonia, and Hungary. His profile lists his interests as travel, aviation, railroads, transportation, and architecture. He also posted photographs on RailGallery.Because of cases like these, amateur photographers are increasingly giving up risky shoots. Still, photographs of trains carrying military equipment were never posted on TrainPix while it operated, or on RailGallery, Andrei (name changed), an acquaintance of Anatoly Nagornov, tells Bereg.Nagornov’s friend Yegor believes the community now practices “self-moderation” because of the war. Still, in the fall of 2022, he came across photos on RailGallery of trains carrying mobilized Russians. He does not know whether the site’s administrators were ever offered photos of trains transporting military equipment.What is happening in the trainspotting community after Eskov and Nagornov’s arrestDossier Center investigator Ilya Rozhdestvensky doubts photographs of Putin’s train were the reason for the prosecution. While preparing the investigation, he did not contact the photographer, Mikhail Korotkov, or RailGallery’s administrators, since the photos were publicly available. Photographs of one of the trains matched a description provided by a source for the outlet’s investigation, Rozhdestvensky said.“On one hand, the FSB or someone else could have spent three-plus years combing the internet and found a forum with the photos,” Rozhdestvensky suggests in conversation with Bereg.He instead favors another theory: amid sabotage attacks on the railroads, security officials may have taken interest in a site with photographs that make it possible to study not just trains but the surrounding tracks and infrastructure. “By that logic, you could just as well round up the administrators of similar sites, FleetPhoto, Aviapix, and so on,” Rozhdestvensky adds.The authors of the Magistral. Kuvalda Telegram channel told Bereg that one of the open services for tracking railcars, Vagon.Online, stopped loading soon after RailGallery’s administrators were arrested.Members of the railroad enthusiast community also complained in chats that other topical sites had stopped loading: Parovoz (Steam Engine), Rossiyskiye Elektropoezda (Russian Electric Trains), and TrainFoto. At the time this article was being prepared, only Parovoz was working again, and it is unclear whether any of this is connected to Eskov and Nagornov’s detention. The administrator of Rossiyskiye Elektropoezda, however, wrote in a forum post that the lack of “clear criteria” for what information about rolling stock can currently be published was one reason for closing the site.One RailGallery moderator contacted by Bereg declined to answer questions. Bereg could not determine the names of Eskov and Nagornov’s defense attorneys or reach them.Nagornov “was far from politics,” according to Yulia Izmailova, and he saw any potential trouble during shoots as easily resolved: “you just need to find the right approach to a person,” she explains, describing his point of view.“RailGallery and photographing trains were Tolya’s favorite pastime. Trouble used to seem like an everyday matter: you could explain something [to Russian Railways employees], come to an agreement. Now the situation is completely different,” Yulia says. “It seems like he just didn’t imagine how far things could go. None of us thought we’d live to see the day when a passion for photographing trains could turn into an arrest and a criminal case. It shouldn’t be this way.”At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.Bereg