The use of parking/maintenance rails for stationary loading has never been done before to my knowledge. The problem is where do you find space to re-inject the cabin on an already closely-spaced line?
Same thing you do in Disney's side loading attractions now... leave gaps.
Personally I think it's just too cumbersome of a process to rely on for this kind of frequency. They'll address the loading problem first I'm sure.
Obviously, you pull out a car after it's been unloaded to create a gap to insert the waiting car into. Keeping the overall line exactly the same spacing. One off, one on, always in a pair.
All those fancy designs on the web show lots of muti-path station options. While one may not be in use today, I'm not sure why a station couldn't be built for a side track.
I understand that today, systems either load onto the line or remove from the line cars in batches typically. That they stop the entire line to allow the switch in the station track. That this same process stopping the entire line is followed when swapping out a cargo car for passenger car. (Although, I swear I saw it done in Vail without stopping the line to swap in and then later out a cargo tray, but that was 20+ years ago, and it makes me feel old. Who knows what I really saw back then.)
I understand that a side track is not in the current plan.
However, I think it's a missed opportunity. A side track that a car is directed to after it's in the station, based on a operator selecting the car to move off the main track should be simple enough. Adding a car back into that gap from a side car, based on an operator selecting to add it back should be simple enough. Having a side track with capacity for say 6 cars, but only holding 2, would give enough space to shuffle out and in for people that virtually stopped slow still isn't slow enough.
The entire restrictions seems to come down to not being able to impact the station track path at all while the line is in motion. If we stopped the entire line to do a swap, it would be easy enough, just operationally poor.
There must be some reason forcing the line stoppage while impacting a station track flow. Perhaps a preemptive caution in case the station track move fails, since more cars are always coming otherwise and the station track needs to be able to receive them when they arrive.
Whatever that reason is, it leads me to believe all those muti-path station options on the web are just a concept and not something real. But, I'm not sure what the real restriction is. Most systems wouldn't need this type of option, so it could just be low demand. But, technologically, it looks simple enough if desired.
Optimizing throughput often means running at less than 100% capacity so that you can handle anomalies without causing more significant delays.
