So what your telling me, and lets get our terms straight here, is that Fisher just sent their bodys down the assembly line in some nilly willy order (like perhaps the way they came over from GM) because their main restrictions in production were going to be convertibles, and vinyl tops and they didn't need to worry about that until the trim shop. And there was an area between the body shop, and the trim shop that allowed the 1500 lb body tubs to be taken out of the order they started production in and be reordered to pull out the convertibles, and cars with vinyl tops so they could go thru the trim shop with the higher work cars spaced out. Wouldn't it have been easier and more efficient (key word in a manufacturing plant) to arrange the bodies in the proper order in the first place? Once a car started down the line in a specific order, all of the parts could then begin flowing to the various work stations along the way in that locked order. Getting 3/4 of the way thru the line and then jumbling them up would wreak havoc with the parts scheduling to each station following the jumble.
You do know the difference between a surge bank (and I am using your term from above) and for lack of a better term a scheduling bank? A surge bank is an area of an assembly plant where the normal 30 ft or so spacing between bodies (or whatever you are making) was reduced to next to nothing so you could build up a larger quantity of bodies in the same physical space, so that in the event of a line stoppage before your surge bank the following stations can continue working until the bank is exhausted. Nothing changes order in a surge bank. A scheduling bank contains multiple parallel paths which would allow one or more vehicles to be pulled of the main line so that a body following behind that car could be allowed to pass, thereby juggling the build sequence. Whenever that happened (if it even could on fishers side) all the subsequent stations would have to be notified so the parts for the vehicle pulled aside could be removed from the line feeding that station. I think you can see the chaos this would cause in a plant everytime it happened. So we're saying that there were multiple parallel sets of rails for the towveyor karts to move along between the paint and trim shops to allow this potential scheduling disaster to occur?
Step back and look at the whole process, no matter whose description you want to use, the one on this site, yours, the retirees, or some combination of these plus any others out there. Think how you would send a firewall down the line and get all of the correct parts assembled to it, and it shipped over to GM. Try to remove the idiot factor where mistakes could be made, and try to minimize the potential for them to happen. How would you want your factory to work. When body number one started down the line at the beginning of the day, every station along the way got parts scheduled for body number 1 and placed into the station subfeed line, then body number 2 started out, and all the stations got parts for body number 2 on their part sub feed line, and this continued day in day out 912 times a day. Any hiccup in the system caused things like an RS tail to get installed on a non RS body, or a red interior on a gold car. These guys on the line didn't wait for the body to arrive at their station, then read the tag, or the UOIT's and then run off to find the correct parts, they were already there.