THAILAND – KANCHANABURI

FEBRUARY 3, 2026

Kanchanaburi, located 3 hours west of Bangkok, is home to the legendary Bridge over the River Kwai and the “Death Railway”. The movie “Bridge over the River Kwai” was actually filmed in Sri Lanka.

We caught an early morning bus to Kanchanaburi. A local taxi (actually the back of a truck) offered to take us around for a nominal fee. Considering we had a return bus booked for that evening, we thought it best to take his offer so we could see what we wanted to see without worry of missing our bus. It was a wise choice.

We told our taxi man that we were hungry. He said he would take us to the DEATH RAILWAY MUSEUM first because they had a restaurant on the top floor. We liked him already, for saving us time and money.

The WAR CEMETERY was directly across the street, so we made a brief stop there first. The Cemetery is the main POW cemetery for victims of the Burma-Thailand Railway. It contains 6982 graves of British, Australian and Dutch POWs. The American dead were repatriated back to the USA. 124 bodies have not been identified. Interestingly, and contrary to popular belief of young teenage soldiers, most of the men were in their late 20s and 30s and many into their 40s.

The DEATH RAILWAY MUSEUM was a somber, yet educational exhibit. A railway between Burma and Thailand was proposed as far back as 1885, but the idea was scraped due to the difficult terrain of jungle, hills and rivers to cross. Although Thailand was a neutral country at the start of WWII, the Japanese invaded in December of 1941 as a staging ground to attack Singapore. In early 1942, Japan invaded British-held Burma. The Japanese needed a supply route to their Burma troops. A sea route was too vulnerable to attack from Allied forces. The railway construction began in September of 1942.

415 km (258 miles) of track were laid in one year. 111 km (69 mi) of the railway were in Burma and the remaining 304 km (189 miles) were in Thailand. Approximately 60,000 Allied POWs (British, Australian, Dutch, American) and over 200,000 Asian labourers were used. Nearly 13,000 POWs and over 90,000 Asian labourers died.  It became known as the “Death Railway” due to extreme cruelty, malnutrition, disease (cholera), and intense labour, particularly at Hellfire Pass.

The exhibit had stories and sketches done by POWs. Had they been found by the Japanese, they would have been killed. Despite the Japanese total disregard for a living POW, they had complete respect for the dead. They allowed proper funerals to take place, and often attended themselves. The POWs took advantage of this lapse in security. They would bury their sketches and diaries with the dead, in hopes of the documents recovery at some future time.

The stories and pictures were heart-wrenching. Doctors were forced to pick the least sick to go to work. If they did not choose enough workers, the Japanese chose for them, often taking severely sick or injured, which expedited their death. Men worked without shoes for months at a time and suffered from ulcers on their feet and legs. They were required to break 3 cubic metres of stone in exchange for 370 gm (13 oz) of rice per day. They had to supplement the rice with whatever they could scrounge. Whatever food was brought in was often crawling with maggots and weevils.

We hopped back into our “taxi” and headed to HELLFIRE PASS. It was called Hellfire Pass because the sight of emaciated prisoners labouring by burning torchlight resembled a scene from Hell.

Hellfire Pass was a particularly difficult section of line to build. There is one cutting section that is 75 metres (246 ft) long and 25 metres (82 ft) deep. It could have been built as a tunnel, but a cutting could be dug from all points simultaneously, whereas a tunnel could only be dug from two end points. 69 men were beaten to death in the six weeks it took to built this cutting. Many more died from disease, starving and exhaustion.

The railway was not built to a level of permanence and it was frequently bombed by the Allies. Bits of trail remain, slowly being swallowed by forest.

There was a memorial at the end of the cutting dedicated to the men who died working on this project.

After the war, the rail line was closed, with only a small section of line still in service. We went to NAM TOK where we caught an old train, with wooden benches. This section of the original rail line is mostly used by tourists. That said, it stopped at every little town along the way back to Kanchanaburi. Students, dressed in their smart uniforms, got on at certain towns and got off at tiny way-side villages. The train was acting as a school bus.

We crossed one of the remaining wooden trestles, of the 680 that were originally built.

The route took us past breath-taking countryside. Some of the stories as told by survivors in the audio guide we were given spoke of how the beauty of the countryside was something that gave them hope and encouragement. There were some forest fires when we passed through, as you can see.

We finally ended our train ride, and tour of this area, back in Kanchanaburi as we crossed over the RIVER KWAI BRIDGE. The real steel and cement bridge, not the fictional wooden bridge in the movie. This bridge was also bombed, but survived.

The sun was setting, which made for the perfect ending for our trip. To me, it symbolized the beauty of the region, the end of a horrible part of history, and a hope for a new beginning. Our taxi took us back to the bus station in plenty of time to catch our return bus to Bangkok.