I think this is behaving as intended.  <link rel="reload"> is intended to pre-populate the cache so that later loads will hit in cache rather than going to the network.  When I reproduce this and look at the net-internals events tab, I do indeed see three URLRequests.  But if you look at their associated disk cache entries, the first one is a write, and the later two are reads--i.e. we're writing it into the cache when we first get it from the network, and then reading it back out without going to the network for the second two loads.  

Let me know if there's something about your concern I'm missing (I'll see responses on this bug even though I'm closing it).