There are a lot of strategies for handling this.  One of which is, accelerate the pods on a separate, shorter (semi-circular?) track before merging into the main &quot;pod stream&quot;.  Similarly, decelerate on a separate, shorter (semi-circular?) track.  There was some prototype (or theory) of this discussed in a link on HN several months ago in which a Chinese train station accelerated (or decelerated, I forget) a car to match the speed of a passing train to append that car to the train as it went by.<p>Just because you need to accelerate and decelerate doesn&#x27;t mean you need to do it on the same shared track as the main line.