[2] Earle's Shipbuilding of Kingston upon Hull on the Humber in England built Ollanta as a "knock down" ship;[2] 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.

Earle's put the engineer William Smale in charge of reassembling and launching Ollanta.

[2] 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.

In 1975, the Peruvian Corporation was nationalized and Ollanta's ownership passed to the state railway company ENAFER.