WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? - All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide - page 107

westbound counterpart so that several cases of soft drinks and a
bag of ice could be handed from our lounge car to theirs.
Being able to get along with people is certainly a prerequisite
for anyone considering a job with Amtrak. By the time someone
gets to be a veteran employee, he or she has seen it all and can
deal with most of it pretty darn well.
There are, of course, many other key jobs in the operational
structure of a railroad, but the emphasis in this chapter is on
those employees who are directly responsible for getting you to
your destination safely and comfortably.
Dispatcher
Wherever the train may be, its progress is controlled every inch
of the way by a dispatcher. The airline equivalent is the air-traffic
controller, but there is an important difference: Railroad dispatch-
ers are employees of the individual railroads, while air-traffic
controllers are employed by the Federal Aviation Administra-
tion (FAA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
(The FAA is one more hidden government subsidy of the airline
industry not enjoyed by Amtrak, by the way.) Dispatchers who
control trains traveling in the Northeast Corridor between Wash-
ington, D.C., and Boston are Amtrak employees, because those
tracks are owned by Amtrak. Elsewhere throughout the coun-
try, the movement of Amtrak trains is controlled by dispatchers
employed by the host railroads—that is, the railroads over whose
tracks the Amtrak train travels.
Like their aviation counterparts, dispatchers are critical to
the safe operation of the nation's railroads. Typically, they work
in darkened rooms, monitoring the progress of trains on an illu-
minated display of the tracks for which they are responsible. The
job requires complete concentration, and their fellow employees
take pains not to interrupt or distract them.