A few weeks ago, I published Amtrak.js, an NPM package which allowed for easy access of the Amtrak API. If you know anything about the API, it is not a simple process fetching data.

I expected that apps and websites would pop up using my library (and the rehosted API at api.amtrak.cc), but none ever came. As my uni classes cooled down from the start of the year, I decided to take it upon myself to make a train tracking app.

My main intention here was to have it use quite a bit less data than Amtrak's official website while also being less clunky on mobile. Why? Well, trying to track your train on 3G and the page happily munching through 10MB of data as fast as possible is, well, not ideal.

I should probably make a more technical writeup over how all of this works at some point in the future, but feel free to ask questions and I'll do my best to answer!