RAILWAY ENGINEER IN BRAZIL & PERU
From the Ashford People’s Library Project: 180 Years of Railway History:
John James Impett, son of an Engine Fitter, Newtown school boy and SER apprentice went on to become a member of the prestigious Institution of Civil Engineers, enjoying an illustrious career in Brazil and Peru.
Recruited as an Office Lad, he later transferred into the workshops as a Fitter’s Apprentice. In 1884 he appears in records as an Engineer on the Paulista Railroad, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a move which transformed his career, the terrain testing his engineering capabilities.
John briefly returned to England in 1889, before travelling to Panama on his way to Peru, where he became the Central Railway of Peru’s Engineer. In a book entitled “Forty Years On” by Lord Ernest Hamilton (1925, pp268-272) the author describes meeting Mr Impett, then the manager of the Oraya railway, who arranges a hair-raising journey between Oraya and Lima by gravity on an unpowered track-trolley with only a handbrake to control speed on the 1 in 33 gradient falling 11,800 ft over 106 miles!
In his 1901 application to join The Institution of Civil. Engineers James states his place of education as the SER’s school and evening classes. He died in 1901 in a house called La Quinta [Oxenturn Road] in Wye [in Kent].
