Virtual Railfan Tour of Peru - Cusco to Lake Titicaca 1997
In 1862 Thames Ironworks in West Ham built the iron-hulled Yavari and Yapura under contract to the James Watt Foundry of Birmingham. The ships were designed as combined cargo, passenger and gunboats for the Peruvian Navy.
The ships were built in "knock down" form; that is, they were assembled with bolts and nuts at the shipyard, dismantled into thousands of parts small enough to transport, and shipped to their final destination to be assembled with rivets and launched on the lake. The kits for the two ships consisted of a total 2,766 pieces between them. Each piece was no more than 3.5. cwt—what a mule could carry—because the railway from the Pacific Ocean port of Arica went only 40 miles (64 km), as far as Tacna. From there pack mules had to carry them the remaining 220 miles (350 km) to Puno on the lake.
The original British contractor got the parts to Tacna but failed to complete the section of the journey with mules. This was not resumed until 1868 and the first plates for Yavari's hull were laid at Puno in 1869. Yavari was launched in 1870 and Yapura in 1873.
Yavari was 100 feet (30.5 m) long and had a 60 horsepower (44.7 kW) two-cylinder steam engine, which was fuelled with dried llama dung.
In 1914, Yavari's hull was extended to increase her cargo capacity. At the same time she was re-engined as a motor vessel with a Bolinder four-cylinder 320 bhp (240 kW) hot bulb engine.
In 1929, the corporation ordered the Ollanta to work along with the Inca.
Earle's Shipbuilding of Kingston upon Hull on the Humber in England built Ollanta as a "knock down" ship; that is, they assembled her in their shipyard with bolts and nuts, marked each part with a number, and then disassembled her into many hundreds of pieces and sent her to Peru in kit form. The pieces were shipped by sea from King George Dock in Hull to Mollendo on the Pacific Ocean coast of Peru. They were then delivered by rail to Puno on Lake Titicaca, where Ollanta was finally riveted together and launched.
Earle's put the engineer William Smale in charge of reassembling and launching Ollanta. At 2,200 tons and 260 feet (79 m) long, Ollanta was larger than any previous ship on Lake Titicaca. Titicaca, therefore, had no slipway big enough to build her, so one of Smale's first tasks was to have one built.
A major ship had not been launched on Lake Titicaca since the Inca 25 years earlier in 1905, so no local suitably equipped workshops or skilled craftsmen were available for Smale to recruit. So, Smale made the best of local labour and improvised machine tools from railway equipment. Earle's sent a skilled team from England to help launch the ship, but Smale got Ollanta completed before the team arrived, so Smale launched the ship using his unaided local workmen.
Ollanta had capacity for 950 tons of freight, 66 first-class passengers on the upper deck of her deckhouse, and 20 second-class passengers in the forward part of the ship. Her four oil-fired steam engines gave her a top speed of 14.5 knots (26.9 km/h; 16.7 mph). She was the Peruvian Corporation's most luxurious steamer on the lake and the culmination of nearly 70 years' development of Titicaca steamers since the building of Yavari started in 1862.
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