Even people in some French cities don't get it. Here in Toulon (southern France, between Nice and Marseille) it's hard to get the point across. Lack of public transit, lackluster bike infrastructure, and decades of car-first policy have left people without a positive vision. For them it's all just about "how do we get more parking into the city?" and "There are too many traffic jams, we need more lanes."

To an outsider (I lived in Grenoble before) it's so obvious that I joined some mobility associations as soon as I moved here, and I wasn't even politicized about this before, nor was I in any real sense active in the associative milieu.

It sounds good, then you try and get a TER (regional train) and find there is one or two a day, using old rolling stock, overcrowded for an exorbitant price.

So if you want to take a TGV to/from Paris, it is nice. Anything else, less so (try looking at fast train route from Lyon to Bordeaux - through Paris)

Amtrak has a 'track your train' portal that shows you where all the trains are

https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html

The location updates, esp. in open areas, is a bit delayed probably due to poor cell tower access :-)

I recently tried to find something like this for the US but it appears security concerns limit public access to a realtime map like this.

Most passenger US rail systems have APIs with realtime positions but I don't know of a single map that includes all of them in the whole country.

Here's a live one for Boston: https://tmap.live/

Here's a live one for NYC: https://aptransit.co/

Here's one for Amtrak: https://amtraker.com/map

For your son though just get the "Transit" app by CityMapper