Thanks for playing! Giving the player better feedback about when it is their turn to place a track and when it isn't, and also when and why their placement is denied is one of the things I have already started working on for a post-jam release.
The intention is that the music and the beat is the main cue for when to place tracks, along with the colours of the tracks in your hand matching the colour of the ground coming up next. Everything else in the game is synced to that rhythm and intended to reinforce it; the animation cycle of the CPU player, the track signals on the side that you noticed, the train's bouncing animation and the train's puff puff noises. But you aren't alone in finding it tricky, so I'm continuing to work on it more.
Allowing placement of extra tracks ahead of the beat timing would break the rhythmic and turn based nature of the game, so it would be a hard pivot to ditch those aspects entirely if I go that way.
Making a pico version was a given, the only headset I own is a pico!