Don't forget that all the loading stations with the exception of Riviera have the extra wheel for standing still loading, or, to double the loading ability, making keeping up with a faster line possible.
Anyway, to understand the correlation of line speed with loading speed it helps to use an extreme example:
Let's say that a gondola arrives every second. Now, if there were not the detachment to slow it down, and no extra gondolas in the station, then people in the gondolas would have less than half a second to jump out and those getting on would have less than half a second to jump in as the gondola whips around the wheel.
Now, let's fill the station with 60 gondolas (30 on one side unloading and 30 on the other side loading). Every second a gondola comes in, another gondola has to leave. If you follow that one gondola coming into the station, it has to wait for the 60 gondolas ahead of it to leave before it gets sent off. This gives it 30 seconds on the unload side and 30 seconds on the load side. (And if that's still too fast to load, it gets sent off empty).
Now, let's slow down the rope by a factor of 10 but keep the same distance (physical spacing) between gondolas. This means a gondola is entering the station once every 10 seconds instead of every second, and now, one has to leave once every 10 seconds. With 60 gondolas in the station, a gondola that arrives has to wait 10 minutes before it leaves. That gives unloading 5 minutes to unload and loading 5 minutes to load.
But sitting in the station 5 minutes waiting to leave is a long time. So, let's reduce the number of gondolas in the station by 10 to have just 6 of them. Arriving once every 10 seconds, a gondola will have to wait 60 seconds for the other 6 gondolas ahead of it to dispatch. This gives a gondola 30 seconds on the unload side and 30 seconds on the load side.
So, now we have the gondolas arriving every 10 seconds. Let's add more gondolas! We put another gondola in between every current gondola decreasing the physical spacing. So, now, every 10 seconds we have 2 gondolas arriving, which is one every 5 seconds. Which means a gondola has to leave every 5 seconds. So, when a gondola comes in and has 6 gondolas ahead of it that will dispatch once every 5 seconds, then that gondola will only be in the station for 30 seconds. This gives folks 15 seconds to unload and 15 seconds to load.
Now, the real math!
d = distance between gondolas
v = velocity of the rope
a = rate of arrival of the gondolas expressed in time between gondolas
g = number of gondolas in the station
l = time that a gondola spends in the station for unloading and reloading
a = d/v
So, if the distance between gondolas is 40m, and the velocity is close to 11 mph (5m/s), then the gondolas would be arriving once every 8 seconds. [40m / 5m/s = 8s]
l = a*g
So, if the gondolas are arriving every 8 seconds and there are 12 gondolas in the station, then an arriving gondola has to wait 8s * 12 = 96s to leave. This gives 48 seconds to unload and 48 seconds to load (maybe closer to 40 seconds each side since loading and unloading doesn't happen on the turn).
The full formula for amount of loading time is: l = dg/v
So, loading time is correlated to distance between gondolas, AND velocity of the rope, AND number of gondolas in the station.
