Kwai Bridge'
Unknown History?
There are many stories and hidden pieces of history which several former railway workers know about which have still not been exposed to the many tourists visiting Thailand. and to assist those who will travel there in future here is just one piece of untold history.There is a cheap museum by the side of the Kwai bridge on the Kanchanaburi side, the one which displays the remains of former prisoners of war in a glass case. Apart from that, outside this museum there is a train, built in Glasgow around 1936. It was one of the first trains to be used by the Japanese.
The local Thai population and Allied prisoners were always looking for ways and means
of putting one over on the Japanese guards. Brenkassi was a small prisoner of war
camp which housed prisoners who worked at the marshalling yard built between the
hills. Caves had been excavated into the side of the hills to act as store houses
and sets of lines led to them. The railway wagons were shunted to just inside the
caves where they were unloaded or loaded . At the beginning of August 1945 the Allies
has commenced occasional bombing missions along the railway. On July 21st 1945 there
was an air raid, and as usual The Japanese ran for cover, at which point the driver
of one of the trains maneuvered it into one of the store caves.
While the raid was
in progress a number of Thai's and prisoners assisted in pulling tree branches and
earth down the hillside to coverthe raid had lasted the usual twenty minutes, by
which time the train was out of sight. There was a great deal of commotion and with
several other trains in the marshalling yard having received severe damage, no one
took particular notice that a train was missing. Especially so when it was found
that the whole of the track north and south had been demolished. Orders were given
to abandon camp and five weeks later the war was over. The train remained where it
was shunted, there was no more railway, and there the train remained until 1989 when
the engineers working for the Australian Blue Mountain Engineering Company found
it. The company were working on damming the river for the purpose of building the
new large reservoirs.
A number of Aussie workers worked in their spare time on recovering the train and
in 1991 they sold it to the owner of the museum.Very few tourists when viewing the
train, know how it came to be there. On one of the back tracks at Kanchanaburi station
there is a water train which was built for the middle east railways. Big water tanks
were positioned at each end of the train in order that it could travel through the
desert without having to take on water. The one thing they did not account for was
a large enough hopper to store fuel for the journey. The train was only used occasionally
because it constantly ran out of fuel and the Arabians sold it to the Thai Government
prior to the war.. After the Bangkok to Rangoon Railway was built it was used as
a water container by the Japanese, but never went further than Takarin camp, the
Japanese would not trust it across the Wampo bridge.
Incidentally the rivets which
are being sold to tourists and are said to be from the original railway, are false,
In fact the people selling them buy them by the sack from the Thai railway company.
Most of the metal used on building the railway was recovered and sold as scrap many
years ago.
