Raising Steam characters

First appears in chapter 3

A young engineer from Sto Lat whose father died experimenting with steam, and who has spent years since working out with mathematics and a sliding rule what his father tried to do by guesswork. Plain-spoken, single-minded, and entirely uninterested in glory, he has built a locomotive that works and wants nothing more than to be allowed to build better ones.

First appears in chapter 8

The first working steam locomotive on the Disc: iron, brass, fire, and noise, built by Dick Simnel and treated by almost everyone who sees her as something more than a machine. People come miles simply to stand and look at her.

First appears in chapter 8

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, who has spent a lifetime deciding which new things the city will be allowed to have and on what terms. He recognizes at once that the railway is not a novelty but a change in the shape of the world, and intends to be holding the reins when it arrives.

First appears in chapter 8

Lord Vetinari's personal secretary: quiet, exact, devoted to stationery and filing, and rather more central to the running of the city than his title suggests.

First appears in chapter 10

The man who made an enormous fortune out of Ankh-Morpork's waste and is now rich enough to be respectable, almost. Loud, shrewd, profane, and impatient, he has the land, the money, and the nerve to back a machine nobody else understands.

Also known as Albert Spangler

First appears in chapter 12

A retired confidence trickster who was given the choice between hanging and public service and has since run the city's Post Office, Mint, and Royal Bank for Lord Vetinari, discovering that swindling people into doing sensible things is more fun than robbing them. Restless, glib, and happiest with a crowd to work, he has begun to find respectability unbearable and is about to be handed the railway.

First appears in chapter 12

Dick Simnel's mother, a practical northern woman who kept the family works going after her husband's death and has firm views about her son, his machine, and the people who want to buy either.

First appears in chapter 18

Moist's wife: head of the Grand Trunk clacks company, chain-smoking, sharp-edged, and a formidable negotiator in her own right, with a long-standing interest in golems and a low tolerance for nonsense.

First appears in chapter 30

A dwarf grag, one of the conservative religious teachers of the deep mines, who preaches that dwarfishness is being destroyed by daylight, by machinery, and by dwarfs living above ground among other species. He speaks for a movement that has grown angrier and better organized than the surface world realizes.

First appears in chapter 35

The Low King of the Dwarfs, ruling from Uberwald over a people split between those who have made lives in the wider world and those who want the old certainties of the deep mines. A cautious modernizer, and increasingly aware that the traditionalists are no longer content to argue.

First appears in chapter 40

Commander of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and Duke of Ankh, a policeman by conviction who dislikes everything about being a nobleman. He is deeply suspicious of anything as fast, as unregulated, and as full of opportunity as a railway.

First appears in chapter 50

A dwarf grag of a very different kind: a scholar and a formidable fighter who argues that dwarfishness is a matter of what dwarfs do rather than of where they live or how deep they dig. He is willing to say so in front of dwarfs who would rather he did not.

First appears in chapter 70

A goblin working the clacks towers, part of a people only recently recognized in law as people at all, who have taken to machinery, signalling, and locomotives with an aptitude nobody expected. He is quick, capable, and quietly proud of the work.