大象传媒

There are many stories and pieces of history, which several former railway workers know about, that remain hidden from the many tourists visiting Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. An item which might be of interest to those who travel there in future is just one piece of untold history.

There is a museum by the side of the Kwai Bridge in Kanchanaburi province. It displays the remains of former prisoners of war in a glass case as well as various other weird statues. Outside this museum there is a train, built in Glasgow around 1936 and one of the first to be used by the Japanese on the Burma-Thailand Railway. During the war, the local Thai population and Allied prisoners were looking for ways and means of putting one over on the Japanese guards, this is just one instance.

Brenkassi was a small prisoner of war camp above Kanchanaburi, which housed prisoners who worked at the marshalling yard. Natural caves in the side of the hills had been enlarged to act as store houses, and sets of railway lines led to each of them so that railway wagons could be shunted just inside the caves, where goods and machinery were unloaded or loaded. At the beginning of August 1945 the Allies had commenced occasional bombing missions along the railway. The air raid on 21 July 1945 was a significant one for many reasons. The Japanese guards ran for cover. The Thai driver of one of the engines manoeuvred it into one of the store caves and, while the raid was in progress, a number of Thais and prisoners set to work pulling tree branches and earth down the hillside to hide the train. The raid lasted the usual twenty minutes, by which time the train was covered and completely out of sight.

There was a great deal of commotion going on, with several other trains in the marshalling yard having received severe damage. No one took particular notice that a train was missing, especially when the Japanese found that the whole of the track north and south of Brenkassi had been demolished. The Japanese guards and engineers were given orders to abandon camp and make their way down to Kanchanburi. Five weeks later the war was over. The train remained where it was shunted, and in the meantime the local Thais had demolished what remained of the railway. Everything that they were able to sell to the scrap merchants was removed and put onto barges going to Bangkok.

The train remained hidden 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 new reservoirs. A number of Australian workers spent their spare time on restoring the train and in 1991 they sold it to the owner of the museum. Very few tourists know how the train came to be there.

Similarly, there is a water train, which was built for the Middle-east Railways, on one of the back tracks at Kanchanaburi station. Big water tanks were positioned at each end of the train so 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 Arabs 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: the people selling them buy them in 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.

Arthur Lane

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