Every night Iron Girder was driven along a set of rails into a locked shed on the compound where she would be safe from interference due to the presence of Harry’s most fearsome attack dogs and also two golems, brought in by Harry because, unlike dogs, they couldn’t be killed by a meal laced with poison poked under the door. They patrolled the huge shed, sometimes with members of the City Watch just for the look of the thing.

Moist spent a lot of time in and around the compound in his not very official but somehow understood role as the grease in the outfit’s management, as essential as the buckets of the stuff that seemed to be required in everything to do with the railway. He had, after all, a stake in the railway’s fortunes as head of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, where money was starting to go in and out faster than a revolving door as Harry wrote cheques for iron shipments, timber and extra metalworkers, many of whom were from the company of Free Golems: every one of them his own man, albeit one made of clay.

And grease was definitely needed here. There was a mountain of paperwork already being generated by the railway, which Moist skilfully passed along to Drumknott, whose passion for paperwork was not quite yet eclipsed by his new passion for the railway. The little pink man was in hog heaven.

Surveyors had been called in to work on a route. They were everywhere with their little theodolites. They treated Dick Simnel as one of them, only different. Moist was pleased about that. Dick had friends now, and if they didn’t understand all of his language they did indeed recognize it as bona fide language somewhat similar to their own and therefore they gave him respect. After all, these other people, in a way, did what he did only in different shapes, stresses, curves, loads, tolerances and substances, and thus where it counted were brothers under the skin. And like Dick, they worked by numbers and knew the absolute necessity of getting them right, and especially they knew the absolute requirement for precision.

In the compound the sound of metal on metal filled the air, and on every flat surface in Harry King’s offices maps were laid out, and they were good maps.

‘Lads,’ Dick Simnel had said to the theodolite men, ‘Harry King is a good gaffer who pays top dollar for a top-rate service. He’s chancing everything to get the locomotives running, so I want you to make it easier for him. Iron Girder can take some slopes, and by ’eck she’ll take more before I’m through, but for now, what I’m telling thee is to keep t’permanent way as level as possible. And I know that there are such things as tunnels and bridges, but they take a lot of time and are flippin’ expensive! Occasionally a little detour might save us a lot of money, which is to say your wages. But think on, and I know it’s obvious, but do not go anywhere near swamps and other shaky ground. A locomotive with its coal tenders, carriages and crew is reet, reet ’eavy and the last thing we want to be learning is ’ow to pull a bogged-down locomotive out of t’quicksand.’