A postcard of the railway bridge over the Mae Klong River in Thailand; the railway is along the northeastern side of the Kwae Noi River. The Thailand–Burma Railway was a 415 km (258 mile) line between Bangkok, Thailand, and Rangoon in Burma (now called Yangon in Myanmar) built by Japan during WW2 to support its forces in the Burma campaign, using forced labour.
About 180,000 Asian labourers and 60,000 Allied prisoners of war worked on the railway; of these, around 90,000 Asian labourers (mainly romusha) and 16,000 Allied POWs died as a direct result of the project. The dead POWs included 6,318 British personnel, 2,815 Australians, 2,490 Dutch, about 356 Americans and a smaller number of Canadians and New Zealanders. It was the subject of the 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai, although conditions for the slave labourers were a lot worse than depicted in that film. The real story has been the subject of a few documentaries on the History Channel and we have a book.
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| After the war most of the railway was dismantled, leaving this station of Nam Tok (about 115 km from Bahn Pong) as the terminus. |
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