Style Guide: Train World

The Voice We’re After

Terry Pratchett, but on a train. Not pastiche — not copying his tics or mimicking Discworld. What we want is the method: a narrative voice that loves its characters, finds humanity absurd and wonderful in equal measure, and trusts the reader to keep up.

The tone is warm but weathered. The world is strange and sometimes harsh, but there’s a dark humour running through it — carried by the people, the situations, and the narrator’s eye for the ridiculous. Moments of wonder sit alongside grime, danger, and the low hum of a train that never stops.

Core Principles

1. Humour From Truth, Not Jokes

Pratchett’s comedy comes from recognition — pointing at something absurd that we all quietly accept and saying it plainly. The humour in Train World works the same way. It’s not gags or punchlines. It’s the way people actually behave when faced with the impossible: they worry about the sandwich they didn’t pay for. They argue about who borrowed the kettle. They name their days of the week because the alternative is losing their minds.

Do this:

Heart attack. Thirty-six years old. In the meal-deal section.

Not this:

He died in such a funny way! The paramedics couldn’t believe it!

The comedy is in the specific, mundane detail placed against the extraordinary circumstance. Never announce that something is funny. If you have to signal that a moment is humorous, it isn’t.

2. The Narrator Has Opinions

The narration is third person close to Elliot, but the voice has a slight omniscient quality — it can pull back just far enough to make an observation about human nature or the absurdity of a situation. This is the Pratchett move: the narrator as a wry, compassionate presence hovering just above the character’s shoulder.

This is the register:

He talked the way some people breathe — continuously, without apparent effort, and with the sense that stopping would be unnatural.

Not bad in the way that tea can be bad — over-steeped, or weak, or made with water that tasted of pipes. This was bad in a way that suggested the person who made it had been given a description of tea by someone who’d once stood near some.

The narrator doesn’t crack jokes. The narrator notices things — and describes them with the precision of someone who has seen a great deal of human foolishness and found it, on balance, rather endearing.

3. Compassion Under the Cynicism

This is the thing that separates Pratchett from mere satire. The humour is never cruel. Characters are flawed, ridiculous, occasionally stupid — but they are trying. Doss guards her bunk like a territorial animal but shares her food without being asked. Mr Fixer is a self-serving operator who also genuinely cares. The Conductor is an authoritarian pragmatist who keeps thousands of people alive.

Every character, no matter how absurd or minor, is a person with their own reasons. Even when those reasons are bad, the narration treats them with the same clear-eyed warmth. Mock the systems, not the people trapped in them.

4. The Mundane Meets the Extraordinary

People on the train don’t marvel at the train. They complain about the plumbing. They argue about bunk assignments. They worry about tea. This is the Pratchett method applied to worldbuilding: the more fantastical the setting, the more ordinary the characters’ concerns should be.

Elliot is our bridge here. He does marvel, because he remembers a world where trains were small and death was supposed to be final. But even his wonder is filtered through the mundane — he doesn’t think “what a magnificent impossible train,” he thinks “this corridor smells of oil and someone’s spilled Fanta.” Specificity grounds the fantastic.

5. Specificity Is Everything

Pratchett’s prose works because it is precise. Not “he was nervous” but exactly how he was nervous. Not “the food was bad” but in what specific way the food was bad, and what that badness revealed about the person who made it and the world they made it in.

The rule: if you can replace a description with a more specific, more concrete, more human version — do it. Every detail should do at least two jobs: describe the thing and reveal something about the world, the character, or both.

He was compact, sharp-faced, with eyes that were already taking Elliot apart and cataloguing the pieces.

This describes Mr Fixer’s appearance and his nature. One image, two functions.

6. Dialogue That Sounds Like People

People don’t explain things neatly. They talk around subjects, interrupt each other, say one thing and mean another. Mr Fixer talks constantly and says very little of substance — until he says something devastating and moves on before you’ve processed it. Mr Plum says almost nothing, but what he says lands.

Pratchett’s dialogue rule: every character should sound like themselves, not like the author. If you can swap the dialogue between two characters without the reader noticing, the voices aren’t distinct enough.

Watch for:

• Characters explaining things they’d already know for the reader’s benefit (Fixer wouldn’t explain the ticket system to Plum)
• Everyone speaking in the same register
• Dialogue that’s too clever — real people fumble, trail off, misunderstand
• Exposition disguised as conversation — Fixer can deliver exposition, but he does it by talking around it, not through it

7. Earned Emotional Moments

The humour is not decoration. It’s structural. It exists so that when the story gets serious — when Elliot realises there’s no way back, when Plum’s past surfaces, when the Conductor’s mask slips — the shift hits. Pratchett could make you laugh and then break your heart in the same paragraph because the laughter made you trust the story enough to be vulnerable.

This means: don’t be afraid of quiet, serious moments. Don’t undercut genuine emotion with a quip. If a moment earns its weight, let it land. The humour will be there before and after — it doesn’t need to be there during.

8. Establish Scale Early

The trains and their carriages are bigger than readers will instinctively picture — miles long, two-storey in places, open-living carriages that run like steerage decks rather than the tidy compartments of a real-world train. A close-third voice naturally tightens to bunk-and-curtain intimacy, and that intimacy is doing real work, but it can quietly erase the vastness the world depends on.

When a location is first entered in a book — and again, briefly, when the reader has been away from it for a while — give one scale-setting beat. Not a dimension. A sensory detail that doubles as a measurement: where the eye runs out, where a sound fades, how far a smell carries. The bunks of Carriage 74 receding into stove-smoke and hanging laundry. A First Carriages corridor whose carpet swallows footfall further than seems reasonable. The kitchen as a commercial operation, not a galley.

One beat per location, anchored in a specific image. Don’t lecture the reader on the size of the train. Show them where the room ends — or doesn’t.

9. Institutional Absurdity

The train is a society, and societies produce bureaucracies, hierarchies, and rules that make perfect sense to the people inside them and look completely mad from outside. This is rich Pratchett territory. The ticket system, the carriage hierarchy, the Conductor’s absolute authority — these are all ripe for the same treatment Pratchett gave the Ankh-Morpork guilds: systems that are simultaneously functional, absurd, and deeply human.

Elliot is the outsider who can see the absurdity because he remembers a different set of absurd systems. He recognises bureaucracy. He recognises class structures. He recognises the way power works. It’s just that here, the bureaucracy runs on chits and the class structure is literally carriages.

What to Avoid

• Wackiness. Pratchett is not wacky. He is precise and observant and the absurdity emerges from taking things seriously. If it reads like Douglas Adams — zany, detached, delighting in its own cleverness — pull it back.
• Cruelty. The humour should never punch down. Characters in the open carriages have hard lives; the narration respects that.
• Whimsy for its own sake. Every humorous observation should reveal character, world, or theme. If it’s just a funny line that doesn’t do work, cut it.
• Breaking the reality. The world must feel solid and lived-in. The humour comes from treating the impossible as mundanely real, not from winking at the reader.
• Over-explaining. Trust the reader. If the joke needs a follow-up line to make sure they got it, the joke isn’t working. Pratchett never explains his punchlines.
• Excessive footnotes or asides. Pratchett used footnotes. We don’t — it would feel like imitation. Our equivalent is the narrator pulling back slightly for a dry observation, then returning to Elliot’s perspective.

Anti-Patterns: Prose That Fails the Method

The principles above say what to do. This section shows what failure looks like, so it’s recognisable in a draft. Each pair is the same beat written wrong, then right. The fault is named so you can spot the category, not just the instance.

1. Telling the joke instead of trusting it

The fastest way to kill Pratchett-method humour is to flag it.

❌ It was, hilariously, the worst tea he had ever tasted — and he’d tasted some bad tea in his time, believe me!

✅ It was bad in a way that suggested the person who made it had been given a description of tea by someone who’d once stood near some.

Why: the wrong version announces the comedy (“hilariously”), addresses the reader (“believe me”), and adds nothing specific. The right version is just precise about the badness and lets the reader find it funny. If a line tells you it’s funny, it isn’t.

2. Whimsy with no second job

Every detail earns its place by doing two things. A detail that’s only “quirky” is dead weight.

❌ The corridor was painted a delightful shade of purple, and a small mechanical beetle scuttled cheerfully along the skirting, because that was simply the sort of place this was.

✅ The corridor smelled of oil and someone’s spilled Fanta, and the carpet swallowed his footfall further than seemed reasonable, the way money always seems to absorb sound.

Why: the wrong version is zany for its own sake (the Douglas Adams failure mode — see “Wackiness”) and tells us nothing about the world. The right version grounds us and reveals class through a sensory detail. Cut any charming thing that doesn’t also carry world, character, or theme.

3. Cruelty mistaken for edge

Mock the system, never the person trapped in it.

❌ Doss was a fat, miserable old woman who hoarded her bunk like the sad, friendless creature she obviously was.

✅ Doss guarded her bunk like a territorial animal and shared her food without being asked, and saw no contradiction in this, because there wasn’t one.

Why: the wrong version punches down and editorialises contempt. The right version finds the dignity inside the behaviour. Every character, however minor, has their own logic and their own dignity.

4. Exposition wearing a dialogue costume

Characters don’t explain things they both already know for the reader’s benefit.

❌ “As you know, Plum, tickets on this train determine your entire social standing, and being without one is a serious offence punishable by forced labour.”

✅ “He’s got no ticket,” said Fixer, the way you’d mention a man had no pulse.

Why: the wrong version is a lecture aimed past the characters at the reader (“As you know…”). The right version conveys the same stakes through how it’s said, and trusts the reader to feel the weight. Fixer can deliver exposition — by talking around it, never through it.

5. Undercutting the moment that earned its weight

The humour builds trust so the serious beats can land. Don’t spend that trust by quipping over them.

❌ Plum said, very quietly, “I was afraid.” Then he farted, and they both laughed, and the tension was gone.

✅ Plum said, very quietly, “I was afraid.” Elliot didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be a tea strong enough for it.

Why: the wrong version panics and reaches for a gag to escape the feeling. The right version lets the moment land — and the restraint of the callback (tea, their shared warmth-motif) carries more than a joke could. Don’t be afraid of quiet. If a moment earns its weight, let it land.

6. Wonder that forgets the mundane bridge

Elliot marvels — but always through the ordinary. Pure awe reads as generic fantasy.

❌ Elliot gazed in astonishment at the magnificent, impossible vastness of the great train stretching away into infinity.

✅ The carriage just kept going. He’d assumed it would end the way rooms end. It didn’t, and he found himself doing the thing he did in unfamiliar supermarkets, looking for the far wall to orient himself, and not finding one.

Why: the wrong version is abstract uplift (“magnificent, impossible, infinity”) — telling us to be amazed. The right version routes the scale through a specific, mundane reflex (the supermarket) so the wonder is honest and the scale-beat does its job (see Principle 8). Specificity grounds the fantastic; the reference to the old world is the bridge.

7. Everyone sharing one voice

If you can swap two characters’ lines without noticing, the voices have collapsed. (See voices for each character’s distinct register.)

❌ “I believe we should proceed with caution,” said Fixer. “Yes, I agree, we should proceed with caution,” said Albion.

✅ “Could be a trap,” said Fixer, already counting the exits out loud, the way he counted everything. Albion said, “Be right.” It was the longest speech Elliot had heard him make all day.

Why: the wrong version is two interchangeable talking heads. The right version distinguishes Fixer’s chatter-that-assesses from Albion’s austerity, and characterises both through the contrast. Read a character’s voices block before writing their dialogue, then write against their calibration lines.

The Pratchett Moves We Use

Elliot’s Voice Specifically

Elliot processes the world through:

• Comparison — constantly mapping Train World onto his old world’s reference points (an IT project manager’s instinct to categorise and file)
• Understatement — the worse the situation, the flatter his internal narration gets
• Self-deprecation — not performed, but genuine; he knows he’s an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation
• Dry precision — “Heart attack. Thirty-six years old. In the meal-deal section.” Facts first, feelings later, if at all
• Reluctant wonder — he doesn’t want to be amazed by this place, but sometimes he can’t help it, and those moments should feel honest

His voice is not witty in the Oscar Wilde sense. He’s not performing. He’s coping. The humour comes from the way a fundamentally decent, slightly overwhelmed man tries to make sense of the senseless by being very, very literal about it.