My thinkpad and also the docking station are purely USB 2. I added a usb3 expresscard (or whatever). It’s a strange beast. It has a barrel connector to add power that connects to a usb2 port. Someone told me the xpresscard bus has usb2 natively but not usb3, so I don’t know what kind of trickery it does but i've also read that mini pcie usb3 cards cannot be used in parallel with usb2 ports.
Is it all the same problem if I try to attach a USB3 card to a docking station? I noticed the pinouts are available for some docking stations, but they tend to have usb3 as some of the pins, which would not likely be the case with pre-usb3 docks.