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What you are really talking about is Postive Train Control, which may use GPS as a component, or may not. It depends on the system. The capacity increasing aspect of PTC is it incorporates a system of "floating blocks," that is, the blocks travel with the trains rather than are permanently fixed to geographic locations. The short answer to your question is PTC might increase capacity, but at a cost that is very unattractive, so far. The electronic equipment is more expensive than traditional Centralized Traffic Control, which itself costs about $1 million per mile, because it requires equipping every locomotive and mobile track machine assigned to the PTC-equipped territory. The software is very complex and expensive -- think fly-by-wire systems on an aircraft. If a railroad doesn't equip its entire fleet with PTC, it takes upon itself a severe loss of flexibility in fleet management. The fundamental difference between GPS and railroad methods of operation is that GPS is an approximation (albeit a pretty good one) and railroad operation is yes/no. That is, a train is either approaching a control point, or it has passed a control point. All GPS does is tell you where a GPS transceiver is -- more or less -- which is not at all the same thing as a signaling system. If an aircraft is plus or minus 20 feet while flying, who cares? A train plus or minus 20 feet is on another track or beyond a control point. I've seen some bold claims of capacity increases with PTC, but there are many skeptics who disbelieve them. No one is rushing to buy it except people using other people's money (that is, taxpayers' money). We might see PTC experiments on high-density freight railroad routes within 10 years. You asked how much capacity could be increased: no one knows the answer to that question yet. Manufacturers claim 20-30%, but no empirical tests to validate those claims have been performed. And without a huge committment of cash on someone's part, a real-world installation (which would give you some real numbers) isn't going to happen.
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