The Dorogomilovsky District Court of Moscow issued the ruling on 14 October, the Moscow courts' press service said; the decision was reported on 16 October.
According to the investigation's account, cited by the courts' press service, Yeskov and Nagornov gained unauthorized access to information belonging to an unnamed organization that constituted a commercial secret and was held "in a critical infrastructure facility of the Russian Federation." They copied the data and published it on their website, investigators allege.
The two are charged under Part 5 of Article 274.1 of the Criminal Code, which covers unlawful interference with Russia's critical information infrastructure resulting in grave consequences. The charge carries a penalty of five to ten years in prison.
RailGallery's editorial board reported the detentions on 15 October, saying it was shocked by what had happened and did not know whether the site could keep operating as usual.
That evening the Telegram channel "1520. All About Railways" noted that RailGallery had stopped loading. The site remains inaccessible.
RailGallery was launched in 2022 after the closure of TrainPix, a popular railway photography site. According to Mediazona, TrainPix was founded by Ukrainians, and after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine its administrators deleted the site's entire archive and urged people to help the Ukrainian army.
Yeskov described the launch of RailGallery in August 2022. By his account, within six months the Russian community had restored half of the TrainPix archive, about 150,000 photographs. By the end of 2022, more than 3,200 users had registered on the site, posting 194,000 images, including 161,500 restored ones.
As "1520. All About Railways" noted, the site became not only a photo gallery but also an extensive database on the history and operation of railway equipment from various countries.
In 2023 the Dossier center published an investigation into the armored train that Vladimir Putin is believed to travel on. The material used a photograph of a train belonging to the company Grand Service Express taken from RailGallery. Journalists found special communications antennas on the roofs of the carriages, and the train is pulled by three locomotives at once. Whether Putin actually travels on this train is not known.