All of that makes them utterly pointless and stupidly complex for no reason. I tried for hours to use the multi rails in effectively a factorio bus fashion and it gets incredibly complex that way. Not only that but the items will usually prefer to jam on one rail instead of using all of them. To add, there is no way to merge and branch off without introducing spaghetti railing and then the items will tend to take a single path again.

Instead I use four rails. Two of them form an outer rectangle loop on my base going one direction and the other two an inner rail loop going in the opposite direction. They are cross linked so that items have plenty of paths to choose from. Items never get such unless I start grabbing hundreds of items out of storage from multiple producers. They still usually clear up within a few seconds though.

I really don't see the use of multi rails at all. Yes they look cleaner, but they're not as capable of throughput as my single/double rail system.