Not really into steampunk myself, (by the way, that pic brings to mind the byline Abraham Clankin') but I think I dig the general thrust. Nowadays we look around and wonder "Couldn't this have turned out any differently?" and once we think seriously about that, then we tend to look back to the initial explosion of the Industrial Revolution, when the big ideas could still come out of a garage or a bicycle shop, and we specifically tend to look back even before heavier-than-air flight, to the Victorian era or, in American terms, Reconstruction. Currently I find myself contemplating a story in which an American space program began in the Thirties with some parallel-Goddard convincing FDR to a) stay ahead of German rocket science and b) launch spy satellites to see what an increasingly worrisome world was REALLY up to. At times you do have to wonder how slight adjustments could have yielded radical results.
I also have to add that I once saw a movie about how a Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada generated much of the Sixties hippie culture, and a lot of that was the adoption of an Old West ambience -- which leaves me to worry if that original "Wild Wild West," with its James Bond plots superimposed over 19th Century technology, could be technically steampunk. Certainly they loved that private train ...
Did a spot of Googling, and as possible candidates for Palomine's heroine I will throw out the names Victoria of Kent, Queen of Savages, Ada Lovelace, and Agatha Heterodyne. I hope that may help.