We introduce a protocol to distribute entanglement between remote parties. Our protocol is based on a chain of repeater stations, and exploits topological encoding to tolerate very high levels of defect and error. The repeater stations may employ probabilistic entanglement operations which usually faill; ours is the first protocol to explicitly allow for technologies of this kind. Given a error rate between stations in excess of 10%, arbitrarily long range high fidelity entanglement distribution is possible even if the heralded failure rate within the stations is as high as 99%, providing that unheralded errors are low (order 0.01%).