Hmm, fresh in my mind is a trip I just took a few days ago, on the Crescent round trip between Washington, DC and Atlanta, GA. In both directions (Train 19(7) and 20(8) ) the train was 10 minutes early into my destination. Hats off to Norfolk Southern for excellent dispatching!
The latest train I was on is probably the Texas Eagle I took from Chicago to Fort Worth, TX about 4 years ago. We were delayed by everything imaginable, from slow freights to employees not immediately getting to work on switching operations in St. Louis, to slow orders due to possible heat kinks (it was 113 degrees in Texas that August day). On that trip, we were over 4-1/2 hours late. The benefit of our late arrival is that it was after 9 PM, and when it got dark it had cooled down to a chilly 109 degrees.
During that same vacation, I was supposed to take the Sunset Limited from San Antonio to Jacksonville. When we got into San Antonio on 21 it was learned that Train 2 was running ten hours late. Why? Simply because Train 1 of the preceeding day had gotten into Los Angeles 18 hours late, and they needed time to turn the train and rest the crews. This experience does not qualify for this topic, however, because they put us on a bus from San Antonio to New Orleans, where we arrived hours before the train would have gotten there had it been on time. At New Orleans, a make-up train became an on-time Train 2 and we proceeded to Jacksonville, where we arrived 15 minutes ahead of schedule! And here I had been thinking of cancelling my hotel reservations there expecting we would get to JAX 10 hours or more late.