Research on tourism to Machu Picchu rarely addresses the ways in which transportation, particularly rail travel, is integral to a visit to the UNESCO world heritage site. Yet the majority of visitors to Machu Picchu arrive by train, making rail travel a crucial component to the way in which the site is understood and experienced. This article examines rail travel to Machu Picchu through archival research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cuzco and at Machu Picchu to argue that rail travel capitalizes on historic and cultural imaginings of Machu Picchu as a lost city, transforming the tourist into an explorer in the process. The experience relies on vision and affect as the train acts a temporalizing machine, taking the tourist back in time to visit another world, perpetuating the myth of lost cities, discovery and dispossession in the process.

对马丘比丘旅游业的研究很少涉及交通运输，尤其是铁路旅行是访问联合国教科文组织世界遗产必不可少的方式。然而，马丘比丘的大多数游客都是乘坐火车到达的，这使铁路旅行成为了解和体验该站点的重要组成部分。本文通过在库斯科（Cuzco）和马丘比丘（Machu Picchu）进行的档案研究和人种学田野考察，考察了前往马丘比丘（Machu Picchu）的铁路旅行，认为铁路旅行利用了马丘比丘（Machu Picchu）作为失落之城的历史和文化想象力，在此过程中将游客变成了探险家。当火车充当临时机器时，体验取决于视觉和影响，将游客带回到过去的时光中去参观另一个世界，使失落的城市神话永存，