CHICAGO — Amtrak is scrambling to fix a glitch in its system causing numerous cancellations and leaving some passengers stranded.

Amtrak passengers Jonathon Briley and his daughters were ready to leave Chicago and head to Carbondale on the train Saturday afternoon, but that plan quickly changed.

“We arrived on Thursday [and] we’re suppose to depart today at 4 o’clock,” Briley said.

That was before Briley, like dozens of other passengers, got word that getting out of Chicago on an Amtrak train Saturday night was unlikely.

“It has been a long, long trip and I was ready to go home,” said Layla, one of Briley’s daughters. “That was like a smack in the face.”

According to Amtrak, the cancellations are the result of a rail industry control system that continues to experience intermittent communication issues.

“They have been working around the clock since Friday morning and it’s a complicated system,” said Marc Magliari, spokesman for Amtrak. “There are so many railroads in the country that are all feeding data into this that has to be feed back to our trains before they can leave the station. It’s a safety rule and it’s an important one.”

Luckily, the Brileys were able to find alternative transportation home — but others like Sarah Baker, who’s in town from St. Louis — haven’t been as fortunate.

“We were suppose to leave at 5:20 p.m.,” Baker said, who has to spend another night at an Air BnB due to the delays. “We got the same train on Monday, 5:20 p.m., back to St. Louis Monday night.”

Shannon Nixon and her classmates from East Lansing, Michigan, had to rely on her husband to make the drive to Chicago to pick them up and take them back to the Mitten state.

“I saw on the news this morning there were these Amtrak cancellations and for some reason I thought it wouldn’t impact us,” Nixon said. “Our solution is my husband is driving down four hours tonight, staying the night, then first thing in the morning driving us four hours back.”

According to Magliari, on any given Saturday, there are typically 24 outbound trains.

Only one departed Saturday.

To help make up for the issues being experienced by travelers, Amtrak is waiving its cancellation fees and offering hotel vouchers for passengers whose trips have been cancelled.

Metra trains have been unaffected by the rail control system issue.

There is no firm timetable on when the issue will be fixed for Amtrak.