Trans-Temporter by Christopher M Robinson - HTML preview

Chapter 6

Pipeways

I’m not jealous of Tanvi but her team shouldn’t really have won that Junior Inventor’s cup for the Tunnels project. Mind you, as the projects went, it was pretty uninspiring. That’s why my team went with the idea of the bike escalator for the Eurotunnel but it didn’t work properly and we were lucky to get a highly commended for it. In retrospect, Chris’s idea of the boring machine model would have been better: we could have created a bigger tunnel shield using a plastic bottle and I’m sure we could have found something to make a rotating blade from, perhaps a small electric fan? But Tanvi’s model only illustrated the idea of a pipe, it didn’t show any of the important features of my dad’s invention, which is probably why we hadn’t even considered it.

Unlike other sunken or floating tunnels, the Pipeway wasn’t rigid concrete but, although stiff, fairly flexible owing to its construction from multiple spun fibres which permitted flexing without any constriction to the tube: a bit like a non-kink hosepipe on a larger scale lined with a very smooth non-stick surface. Pods shaped like a double ended bullet and with a similar smooth exterior had strong magnetic poles at either end and filled the pipe. They didn’t completely seal the pipe but were only a couple of millimetres narrower than it.

There were two standards of pipeway. The majority only had a bore of 150 centimetres and were usually laid in pairs: one for each direction of travel. They were made on-site by a slow moving machine that 3D printed the fibres laid in two counter rotation spirals with the interior surface applied at the same time. These machines emitted the pipes behind them as they moved slowly forwards.

The magnetic propulsion system also used new Russian alter-magnetic technology. Ferromagnets like iron work because all the atoms that constitute them have electrons spinning the same way. In hard iron magnets, they all spin that same way all the time. In soft iron magnets,

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they can be made to spin the same way by being placed in an electric field. Anti-ferromagnets are the ‘non-magnetic’ materials whose electrons spin in random directions around their atoms. Altermagnets are the best of both worlds whereby they can have all the benefits of ferromagnets and of anti-ferromagnets and many new magnetic or magnetisable materials had been produced. This had enabled the construction of transparent pods which, at the same time as being able to be magnetised could also be seen through which had advantages for some loads that could be seen though the walls of the pod on arrival.

At intervals along the way, there were magnetic booster stations clamped around the pipes. I think these were actually more like linear induction motors than fixed magnets which were triggered by the approach of a pod to attract it into the booster section and then repel it onwards and able to increase or decrease the speed of the pods whilst doing so but the pulsing of the magnetic field was quite complex. The spacing and magnetic intensity of the boosters depended on the terrain of the pipeway. They were always powered by readily available ‘environmental energy’; boosters along the Great Trans-Australian Pipeway (the “TAP” or “tappie”), for instance were all solar powered. To date, that is the longest pipeway running about 3500 kilometres from Perth to Sydney and crossing the Nullabor plain. Reaching speeds up to 1800 kilometres per hour, It permits pods to carry goods across the continent in just two hours. Undersea pipeways used the currents to produce the required energy and, in some cases like long fjords where currents may not be so dependable, discreet floating solar panels were wired to the booster stations below. Of course, underwater pipeways also require occasional tethering to the seabed and floating platforms anyway, though not so rigidly to prevent some movement to reduce stresses.

Tanvi, who is presently training to be a surgeon, likens the pipeways to the oesophagus. The extremely low friction surface she likens to the mucosa and the work of the boosters to peristalsis. As Mike is acutely aware, the oesophagus is the tube that carries food from the mouth to the stomach, lined with a mucosal layer, providing lubrication by mucous,

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whilst the muscular contractions of peristalsis squeezes the pipe behind the boluses to help propel them forwards, except the pipeway isn’t compressible.

Nowadays most shipping of goods is in pods which have largely replaced the shipping containers previously used. Standard pods were two and a half metres long permitting them to be stacked across the width of the older road and rail carriers for those containers. They don’t hold as much as a container but they have the advantage of fast delivery.

At the entrance and exit stations, alongside the partial air evacuation ports to provide a ‘semi-vacuum’, the pods travel through magnetiser-demagnetisers to ‘mag’ and ‘demag’ the pods so they don’t cause problems in the collection and delivery yards.

Larger pipeways are similar in construction but are three and a half meters in diameter, and not partially evacuated of air, taking larger pods but travelling at a slower speed over shorter distances such as the pipeway linking Scotland and Northern Ireland. Although passengers can not be carried through the narrow pipeways, the larger ones can also handle passenger carrying pods. There was originally concern that passengers wouldn’t use them, but it’s just like travelling on an aeroplane. You sit in a cylinder that hurtles you to your destination.

The Chinese are currently planning pipeways to connect the continents under the oceans and some are looking at the feasibility of making them to the wider standard to enable passenger travel. Apart from cost, the arguments for the narrower pipeways are for speed as they are twice as fast as the wider ones.

In the early days of the pipeways, concern was expressed about what would happen if a pod became stuck in the pipe. Special, powered rescue vehicles were constructed which have so far never been needed. A further concern regarding passenger carrying pods is about excessive G-forces but the larger pipes do not provide the same speed and acceleration is no more than experienced in an aeroplane taking off, though much smoother.

…

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The SSS board had an emergency meeting, which I was permitted to attend, to discuss the Valu ransom demand. We didn’t know who the kidnappers were nor why they so desperately wanted to get their hands on a temporter. They had also provided an almost impossibly tight deadline and we had no way of contact them to negotiate any further as Valu’s phone had been switched off after the text had been sent. Of course, the deadline was theoretically just about achievable if we were to act now. We had a spare temporter at SSS and a pod it could be loaded into. We would be able to send it via the automated rail system from the Lesser Heath station when it would speed to the northern Channel Pipeway terminal, transfer to the pipe and reach Marquise in under an hour.

We had to assume the kidnappers knew all that and that we would be unable to get there physically ourselves in the time. We discussed whether to get the gendarmerie involved but our principal concern was Valu’s safety and what threat may be caused by a rushed operation.

“I vote we give them what they ask for,” I stated.

“But we don’t know what they’ll do with it,” was the response.

“Valu told us to,” I said, “and she suggested a plan.”

Vintage music was a current fashion trend with broadcasters playing the sort of music our ancestors listened to a hundred years ago that Valu and I had enjoyed listening to. In those days there was an annual competition amongst the European nations to provide a song that would help unite the continent. The EuroVision Song Contest had eventually given way to the World in Harmony Project, part of Feline Arts Solution (FAS), which some had nicknamed “farts”. FAS had mimicked the SSS, using the motto, “Harmony through Arts,” whilst adopting a cat as their logo – something to do with the similarity of the words feline and felicity, or happiness, or it could have been adapting the Maneki-neko or Chinese, or Japanese, beckoning cat symbolising good luck. In that competition one hundred years ago, Great Britain had been represented by a female singer by the name of Clodagh Rodgers. Whilst it hadn’t won, the song she sang came fourth and was really catchy appealing to the seventeen year old

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immensely. I had known why she had signed herself Clodagh in the ransom text. She was sending me a message with a suggestion as to how we could save her. It would take guts but she knew I’d do it.

The song was “Jack in a box.”

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