Tolliver Station

The yard, the pump hall with its pump annex, the control room, the plant room, the crew room, the north deck along the water side; and, two hundred and ten metres north across the spillway gully, the annex.

1. TV-YARD Station yard, the south gate and the service road Fr 1–14 published The Surveyors, chapter 15 — 'The station yard held more vehicles than Sarah had seen there in her life … A security rover sat across the gate with one door open. There was an ambulance backed up against the pump-hall wall, and two evacuation buses nose to tail on the service road'; ch15:125 — 'a team at the south gate'

   A vehicle gate at the south end and a service road off it. On the incursion day the yard fills with maintenance trucks, an ambulance against the pump-hall wall, two evacuation buses and a line of private cars being waved south; when the annex main lets go, 'half the yard had gone behind a wall of white spray' (The Surveyors, chapter 15). ⚠ This is NOT the station gate of the Choice — that is the hand-wheel isolation valve at the north end of the plant room (TV-PLANT), corrected 2026-09-21.

2. TV-SHED Walkway shed and the crane — the walkway root Fr 1–10 fixed spec ruling 2026-09-21 on The Surveyors, chapter 6 — 'a low building, a crane, three sheds and a walkway out to the intake head'; ch06:47 — the encoder 'reported the angle to Tolliver's board and to the settlement network and to a display on the wall of the shed'; ch06:79 — 'They sat on crates in the shed with the door open'

   Three sheds are published; this is the one at the walkway root with the intake-head angle display on its wall and crates to sit on. The crane stands beside it. The walkway leaves the water side here for the intake head (TV-INTAKE). The pump annex (TV-PANNEX) is the second shed; the third is not placed.

3. TV-CREW Crew room — the table by the plate — and the changing room Fr 14–30 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'at the table by the plate, with his hands round a cup that had somebody else's name on it'; ch16:15 — 'a pan on the plate because the kettle had gone three years back and nothing had replaced it'; The Surveyors, chapter 15 — 'A worker came in from the changing room with an armful of towels off the drying rail'

   Where Jones draws the cracked culvert crossings in pencil on Wednesday morning and where the six-line plan is written on the back of the drawing at four in the afternoon (Terminal Black, chapter 16). No kettle since 2346. The changing room with its drying rail opens off the control room. ⚠ 'Three at Tolliver' (Terminal Black, chapter 20) and 'Tolliver, three people' (Terminal Black, chapter 27) are a head-count in the occupancy census – Jones and two of Bell's people through the black — not three rooms; corrected 2026-09-21.

4. TV-CTRL Control room — the boards and the control bus Fr 30–42 published The Surveyors, chapter 15 — 'The main room had four people at the boards and another two working with the covers off a cabinet along the back wall, kneeling on a folded coat because the floor down there was concrete and had been cold since 2311'; ch15:59 — 'the cabinet along the back wall read like a core sample of forty-five years of the colony's engineering budget'

   ⭐ Up a flight of steps from the yard (The Surveyors, chapter 15). The cabinet along the back wall: whole generations of adapters, each bolted on by somebody solving that year's problem and none ever removed. A wall display carries the settlement distribution map with the freeze-risk sections in blue; a radio talks to itself on a shelf; cups on the table that move when the pump hall bangs through the shared wall (ch15:281); a window that the 2348 burst moves in its frame (ch15:291); the room key to the hall (ch15:289). The north-deck camera and the annex camera are watched from here (ch15:113,:225). In 2349 the station panel of these boards is mirrored at Hart on June's slate (Terminal Black, chapter 17).

5. TV-PLANT Plant room — treatment set, intake switchgear, heat-trace controls, the sump, the station gate and the gallery door Fr 42–50 published Terminal Black, chapter 17 — 'Treatment set. Intake switchgear. Header heat trace controls. The header's own supply … There is no second set of any of that on this planet'; ch16:71 — 'The station-side isolation was a hand-wheel gate at the north end of the plant room, and it was the boundary'; ch17:31 — 'it comes out of the gallery door into my plant room, because the sump is in my plant room and it always has been'

   ⭐⭐ THE ROOM THE COLONY CANNOT LOSE. The treatment set (about fifteen cubic metres a day, every day – Terminal Black, chapter 27), the intake switchgear, the header's heat-trace controls and the header's own supply. ⭐ THE STATION GATE: a hand-wheel isolation valve at the room's north end, frame 50 — on its station side the header, the intake and the treatment set; on the other side two hundred and ten metres of gallery, the annex and nine kilometres of main. Shut since Friday night 18 March; opened at 19:08 on the 23rd, nine minutes at the wheel (ch16:157,:191); shut again at 20:22 (ch17:177). The gallery sump is here, ninety litres a minute on the station supply (ch17:61). ⚠ The gallery door opens into this room and 'the door opens the wrong way' (ch17:53); dogged at 20:25. By the door: the repair sheet for the weld 'in a hand nobody at Tolliver could still put a name to' (ch16:13), the gauge sheet where the eight numbers go after every walk (ch16:15), and the annex-outlet correction in Jones's own hand from July that he has forgotten (ch17:165). Floor 180 square metres, the drawing's — fourteen centimetres of water on it at four in the morning is twenty-five cubic metres (ch17:227).

6. TV-PUMP Pump hall — the banks and the local board Fr 14–46 published The Surveyors, chapter 15 — 'the lights were still on in the pump hall with a foot of water going through it'; ch15:153 — 'two's carrying the north main. One feeds the old equalisation line'; ch15:89 — 'running the banks off the local board in the hall with two people and a lot of shouting'; ch15:193 — 'the cage for the insulated tools'

   Banks one and two (count never given). Bank two carries the north main; bank one feeds the old equalisation line that lets the two halves of Lake Ward even themselves out. The local board, with a cage of insulated tools beside it, ran the banks for nine days in '46 when the board cooked itself. Shares a wall with the control room — the 2348 bangs come through it deep enough to move the cups (ch15:281). The intake pumps are drawn here on the station's own supply (Terminal Black, chapter 16); the prose never places them. Ambulance against the outside of the yard-end wall on the incursion day.

7. TV-PANNEX Pump annex — the shed on the pump hall's north wall ('the annex' of 2348) Fr 46–50 fixed The Surveyors, chapter 15 — 'There's a cabinet in the annex — that's the shed on the end of the pump hall, north wall, where the main goes out to the ward — with the whole legacy side landed on one terminal block'; ch15:295 — 'the annex main — the length of the north main that ran out through the annex, and the only way the north main left the station at all. The joint that let go had been put in when the station was built'; reconciled with Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'The transfer main left the station along the gallery … and came out into a squat concrete building … which everybody called the annex' (spec ruling 2026-09-21)

   ⭐ TWO ANNEXES. This shed is the annex of The Surveyors: the legacy side of the control bus landed on one terminal block, an annex door (The Surveyors, chapter 15), an annex camera that fails first with a suited arm inside the cabinet (ch15:225), a roof reached by an exterior service stair, up which one of the figures carries the low unit 'taking the steps one at a time with both hands on it' (ch15:541), and the relay stands on that roof about an hour after the burst. The 2348 joint let go here — the main 'tearing itself out through the annex wall' (ch15:389) — and the spray filled the yard. Ruling: the main runs pump hall → this shed → along the block's north wall → the hand-wheel gate at the plant room's north end → the gallery door. The annex of Terminal Black is the equalisation chamber at the other end of the gallery (TV-ANNEX). 'We hold the station. We leave the annex.' (ch15:449) is said of this one.

8. TV-NDECK The north deck — along the water side Fr 30–50 published The Surveyors, chapter 15 — 'Two figures moved along the water side of the station in the same kind of outer shell as the body at the service cut. Between them travelled a low piece of equipment on narrow supports. It stopped at each junction box'; ch15:121 — 'The trunk runs under that deck. The load moves after they stop at each box'

   An exterior deck along the water side at the block's north end with the old legacy trunk running under it and a junction box every few metres; the north-deck camera looks along it from the control room and gives 'scale and movement and very little else' (ch15:115). The figures work box to box toward the pump annex. Length and box count are the drawing's.

9. TV-ANNEX The annex — equalisation chamber on the far bench Fr 260–275 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'a squat concrete building at the top of the intake road, which everybody called the annex and which was properly an equalisation chamber — a surge vessel, a breather, a set of relief paths and, on the outlet side, the transfer valve'; ch16:201 — 'the transfer valve at the far end on its plinth'; ch17:203 — 'The annex has three relief paths and a chamber drain. The chamber drain discharges into the gallery'

   ⭐ Across the spillway gully, at the top of the intake road. The gallery comes up eight steps into the chamber floor through a steel door with a lever that stands open all year 'because it was a chamber door and not a weather door' (ch16:201). Inside: the main along the wall at head height, the surge vessel, the breather, three relief paths, the manual chamber drain that discharges into the gallery, and at the far end the transfer valve on its plinth with its actuator (fifteen years old — ch16:99) and position transmitter, whose terminal box has eight millimetres of ice in it on the Tuesday (ch16:103). A tray with a handset jack (ch16:205). A bench. No heat (ch17:155). Outside: the annex outlet gauge, which has read four low since the summer (ch17:165); the outer door onto four kilometres of intake road round the head of the gully (ch17:95); a ladder on the north side with one rung to be written down as bad and not as broken (Terminal Black, chapter 13). ⚠ The 2348 joint and the relay roof belong to the pump annex at the block (TV-PANNEX), not here — corrected 2026-09-21.

⭐ 'The gallery was the best thing at Tolliver and everybody who had ever worked there said so.' A metre and a half wide, just over two metres high, concrete, dry; the main on brackets at head height along the west wall, a handrail under it, a cable tray on the other side. Falls to the station. You went out along it and you came back along it and you never once put your face outside.

1. TV-GAL-A Gallery — station door to the weld (0–60 m) Fr 50–108 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'it carried the transfer main along its west wall on brackets at head height, a metre and a half wide and just over two metres high, concrete, dry, with a handrail under the pipe and a cable tray on the other side'; ch16:197 — 'The gallery had not been under ten degrees in thirty-eight years, the 2311 drawings called it a heated ventilated corridor'

   The station end. The main is bare — nobody ever lagged it, because lagging on a pipe in a corridor is mostly a way of hiding the pipe from the man who has to look at it. Four gauges along the run, read out and back, eight numbers a walk (ch16:15). The handset pair's cable runs in the tray (ch17:207). Drawn at a metre and a half on a forty-metre beam; the band is the corridor's true width.

2. TV-WELD The weld at the sixty-metre mark Fr 108–112 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'There was a weld in the main at the sixty-metre mark … cut it at the sixty, weld it back with the strain out of it, and re-fix eight metres of bracket either side. The brackets that went back were rigid ones, because rigid ones were what the store had that week'; ch17:19 — 'sixty metres in from the station door and a hundred and fifty short of the annex steps'

   ⭐⭐ Years back (2341 by the series ledger) the slab settled at the hundred-and-forty and along most of the run behind it and took the pipe down with it. Tolliver cut the pipe at the sixty, welded it back with the strain out, and re-fixed eight metres of bracket either side — rigid ones. Written on the repair sheet by the plant room door. Five days dry at minus twenty, two hundred and ten metres of steel pulled against those eight metres of rigid bracket on either side; at 19:08 on 23 March eleven-degree water went in under static head and the pipe began trying to grow back against the same brackets; at 20:09 static head became flow (ch17:21).

3. TV-GAL-B Gallery — the weld to the lip at the hundred-and-forty (60–140 m) Fr 112–190 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'The slab had settled years back, at the hundred-and-forty and along most of the run behind it'; ch17:81 — 'I've been down the steps and along a hundred and twenty metres … It's another thirty from where I turned round'

   Micah's turn-round point on the night is at frame 140 — a hundred and twenty metres down from the steps, thirty short of the weld: 'It's coming out of the pipe sideways at head height, right across the section, and the floor's a moving sheet the whole last stretch before you get near it. Nobody's walking through that.' Boots and to the knee (ch17:89).

4. TV-GAL-C Gallery — the lip to the annex steps, under the spillway gully (140–207 m) Fr 190–257 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'The reason it was two hundred and ten metres and not twenty was the spillway gully. The annex stands on the far bench. On the surface the intake road goes four kilometres round the head of that gully … and the gallery goes straight under it'; ch16:199 — 'The lip at the hundred-and-forty caught his boot the way it had caught it every time'

   Straight under the gully. The lip at frame 190 where the slab settled catches every boot that has ever walked it; Jones, sixty-four, has gone over it twice this week (ch16:135). Whoever set the gallery out did the four-kilometre arithmetic and got it right.

5. TV-STEPS The eight steps and the lever door Fr 257–260 published Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'At the annex end the gallery came up eight steps into the chamber floor and there was a steel door at the top with a lever, which stood open all year because it was a chamber door and not a weather door'

   The two-hundred-and-ten mark. Eight steps up into the annex floor; the run of the flight is the drawing's.

Four hundred cubic metres of treated water at eleven degrees, under a metre of earth, with a heat trace round the base that has run since it went in. Nothing on Hart had to be done to it.

1. TV-HEAD The header — bermed concrete cell Fr 42–50 published Terminal Black, chapter 16–25 — 'Under the north end of the station, in a bermed concrete cell with a metre of earth over it, sat the header. Four hundred cubic metres of treated water at eleven degrees, in a cell with a heat trace round the base of it that had been running since it went in'

   ⭐⭐ It would not freeze, it needed nobody standing over it, and it could be given to people in buckets or through a pipe — enough to keep a hundred and thirty people alive for a long time. Read at the glass, not at a panel: 'I watch the cell and not a panel' (ch16:169). Two hundred and thirty-one cubic metres on the morning after the split; a little over three hundred and twenty-five a week later; five days off full (ch27:161). Cell 8 m × 12.5 m × 4 m of water — plan area the drawing's, sized so that thirteen cubic metres at low flow reads as 'off thirteen centimetres' (ch17:11). Its heat-trace controls and its own supply are in the plant room directly above.

The lake was still liquid, which everybody in the settlement had stopped believing by about Sunday.

1. TV-INTAKE Intake head — the rotating screen drum Fr 1–10 fixed The Surveyors, chapter 6 — 'a walkway out to the intake head, which was a steel drum the size of a small house standing in eleven metres of water with its top two metres showing'; ch06:47 — 'The head was a rotating screen. Water came in through a slotted drum, the drum turned to face the current so the silt swept past instead of packing in, and a ring gear under the deck plate moved it'; reconciled with Terminal Black, chapter 16 — 'The intake was under four metres of it' (spec ruling 2026-09-21: the drum stands in eleven metres; its slotted screen draws about four metres down)

   ⭐ Off the water side at the end of the walkway — the frames are the drawing's projection. A slotted drum the size of a small house, top two metres above the water, turning to face the current. Under the deck plate: the ring, the pinion, the encoder body and a plastic spider coupling the size of a thumb that is the cheapest part in the assembly and the only bit that lets the gear turn while the encoder stands still (ch06:111–115). Round the collar, a painted scale put there by Celia Reyes with a brush 'because she got sick of arguing with a screen' (ch06:55,:63): the display said 184 for nine days while the mark stood at 173 — eleven degrees off, drawing off the silt shelf. Drawing since Friday 18 March 2349 because nobody shut it off and because the intake pumps are on the station's own supply, off a heat-and-power take from the aquifer plant that Peter Jones fought for (Terminal Black, chapter 16). The school swim programme has the near channel on Thursdays (ch06:147).