Adventures on Peruvian Railways

Not infrequently, our book projects lead to whirlwind adventures abroad. This isn’t surprising given the fact we have clients in India, France, Sweden, and England, in addition to our clients throughout the United States. But sometimes even we’re amazed by the places we find ourselves.

Take Peru. In August, I found myself riding through the Andes on a freight train. To be more exact, I found myself perched on the front of a locomotive, in the fresh air, as the train sped through tunnels, across bridges, and around sharp curves and counter-curves. From a distance, I must have looked like a fidgety figurehead. Or a life-sized hood ornament.

I travelled to Peru with IPI affiliate and head writer John Landry to gather research about the future of transportation for a book we’re developing with Henry Posner III of Railroad Development Corp (RDC). Two other writers, a photographer, and two friends of Henry also made the trip, and our group of eight rode in La Paquita, a 1930s wooden office car, to an altitude of 15, 681 feet. (Until the Chinese built the Qingzang railway in Tibet, The Central—the line we were on—held the record for being the highest railroad in the world.)

Topics of conversation during our ascent included mining and shipping in the Andes, the virtues of wooden railroad ties, semicolons (turns out, we all love them), the brilliance of the four-course meals that Hugo, our fearless chef, prepared in La Paquita’s kitchen, and several spontaneous exclamations that went something like, “I can’t believe we’re here. Doing this!” But we were.

This is our work. In the course of our journey through the Andes, we identified and refined the theme of Henry’s book and gathered enough content to move forward on a proposal. As collaborative writers, these face-to-face deep content dives enable us to immerse ourselves in the material and speed the development process in a way that’s just not possible over e-mail. So it may not sound like work, but it is. It’s just the best type of work imaginable.