RailForLess.us was created to modernize the Amtrak booking experience—matching competitors in other transportation sectors like Google Flights. With increasing investment in passenger rail and a growing desire for more climate-friendly transportation solutions the need for a modern Amtrak booking service is greater now than ever before. Policy and infrastructure can only go so far—every aspect of train travel must match the convenience of driving or flying for widespread adoption, including the booking process. There's no silver bullet to bringing American rail travel to world-class standards, but we're doing our part to make the experience more accessible to everyone.
There has always been a need for a better Amtrak booking app. As early as 2010, Paul Marlin created AmSnag—a simple webpage which returned fare information across a given date range. While simple in premise, this service became invaluable to frequent travelers searching for cheap fares. At the time Amtrak did not display more than a single day's fares at once; comparing travel options was a tedious process of iterating one-by-one through single-day requests. Unbelievably, more than a decade since AmSnag's inception Amtrak has not improved this experience, and in many ways has actively hindered the functionality of their site by removing key features over the years.
Ultimately, AmSnag's scraping technology was rendered useless by changing web development technologies sometime in the mid-2010s. In 2022 RailForLess.us was created by Sean Eddy—a college student looking to build a new ambitious web app. Surprisingly, just matching the functionality provided by AmSnag 12 years earlier was a significant challenge. At the time of AmSnag's creation the web was a simpler place; scraping the content of a webpage was as simple as making an HTTP request and examining the returned HTML. Now, the modern web relies heavily on client-side rendering where UI elements and information are rendered through a complex process of executing JavaScript code and fetching content from other servers. Scraping amtrak.com in 2022 would require a fundamentally different approach than the strategies that worked a decade ago.
For a while, development was slowed by circumventing reCAPTCHA, an embedded tool created to detect and deny access to any suspected automated activity. Eventually these issues were mostly overcome and RailForLess.us was live and functioning—yet it still couldn't match the speed nor utility of a service made a decade prior. The scraping process was slow and vulnerable to constant UI changes which broke the site.
The current state of RailForLess.us is the result of a collaboration between Sean Eddy and Riley Nielsen—another college student working to build a similar solution around the same time. Riley had developed a complex scraping methodology which drastically improved the speed, practicality, and scalability of the service. Since Fall 2023, Sean and Riley have worked tirelessly to improve the site in their spare time as students.
Sean is a graduate student at the University of Arizona studying Computer Science. He enjoys exploring the Sonoran Desert on his bike, trying Tucson's Mexican restaurants, and designing Lego models. Learn more about him and his projects at seaneddy.com.
Riley is a software engineer from Minnesota. He enjoys reading, riding his Onewheel, travel, and creating films in his spare time. Trains and using technology to help others are passions of his. Learn more about him and his projects at rileynielsen.com.
