HOW IT ALL WORKS - All Aboard: The Complete North American Train Travel Guide - page 185

floodlights mounted on each. This is a good example of the use
of modern technology in the railroad industry. These lights are
actually scanners, pretty much like the ones you're used to in
the checkout lines at the supermarket. As a freight train passes
slowly between these posts, the scanner is used to identify, count,
and sort specific freight cars from coded numbers on their sides.
Delays and Why They Happen
Unlike most of the railroads in Europe, passenger trains in
North America are required to operate within a system primarily
designed to handle freight trains. When an Amtrak train is run-
ning on track owned by one of the host railroads, that company
and not Amtrak becomes responsible for the train's progress.
Amtrak has incentive contracts with many of these railroads,
paying bonuses to them for keeping Amtrak trains on time and
withholding those payments for poor records. In spite of these
arrangements, Amtrak trains can be delayed when dispatchers
for these host railroads give priority to their own freight trains.
Unfortunately, sometimes that happens—and with some rail-
roads more than others.
The long-distance passenger trains are more likely to expe-
rience delays than those on the shorter runs, and that's simply
because there's more time for something to interfere with the
train's progress. An Acela running between New York and Wash-
ington, D.C., is on 225 miles of track owned and controlled by
Amtrak. It's far more likely to run on time than the California
Zephyr, which travels the 2,400 miles between Chicago and Oak-
land over tracks controlled by two different railroads—Burling-
ton Northern Santa Fe and Union Pacific.
Delays are a fact of life in rail travel, but it will ease the aggra-
vation if you know something about why they occur. Amtrak
makes a distinction between inbound delays (late arrival) and