Was the whole point of this site to make the cars more visible on the map? B/c they're super hard to see! Would've been so much easier to just use a regular Leaflet slippy map or something and just drop an icon for each car... Could've done that in a day. Sigh.

They mention in the article that a live map of the trains themselves is minor and more of an afterthought.

The main purpose is to show live updated route information.

You're right. It's really silly isn't it. They have a known set of vector shapes, on a quite small portion of a map, with limited geometry. Trains travel along those lines, and really there is not much going on an at all. I don't understand how performance and the technical challenges are so bad for such a limited scope render.