What you have is what you get as an unwanted but mandated guest on freight railroads, with no legal ability to enforce any performance level. And the longer the trip the more exposure there is to random s**t. As a practical matter, no Amtrak train more than a few hundred miles long should be expected to be within 1/2 hour of its schedule at the endpoints, and an hour at intermediate points (makeup time is built in to long-distance schedules in spots). But you have to be at the station on time because occasionally the random problems don't occur and the train is on time.

The regional operations like IL and Cal-Amtrak do better because the runs are shorter, many of them are on BNSF which on average does better than the other railroads at handling the trains (though not the best), and the oversight is more focused (dedicated state agencies, or local operations with state support). Of course, there are also more trains per day, which means a couple of delays can happen without spoiling the stats too badly (the San Joaquins and Surfliners seem to have at least one train with major delays every day, while the Capitol Corridor does much better, which sort of gives the lie to the BNSF reliability thing because CC is mostly on UP).

The easy way out is to kill off the long-distance stuff and devolve the rest to the states that are already paying for it. That has bad effects on those who rely on the long-distance trains, and it eliminates Amtrak as a national network. Essentially, what that does is what Via did in Canada: only corridor and "essential" service remains, other than the Canadian which is practically never less than several hours late overall and often double-digits of hours late. Canada has only a narrow strip of significant population near the US border, so a single cross-country train can provide essential rural service in addition to high-priced tourist service. The US has rather more area to cover, and needs more than one cross-country train - in fact, I'd argue (when adequately lubricated) that we already have at least one train too few rather than too many.