It was built from 1940 to 1943 by Southeast Asian civilians abducted and forced to work by the Japanese and a smaller group of captured Allied soldiers, to supply troops and weapons in the Burma campaign of World War II.

[failed verification] They were British subjects who, without access to food or medical care, continued to die of malaria, dysentery and malnutrition.

To avoid a hazardous 2,000-mile (3,200 km) sea journey around the Malay Peninsula, a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon seemed a feasible alternative.

[12] The project aimed to connect Ban Pong in Thailand with Thanbyuzayat in Burma, linking up with existing railways at both places.

The two sections of the line met at kilometre 263, about 18 km (11 mi) south of the Three Pagodas Pass at Konkoita (nowadays: Kaeng Khoi Tha, Sangkhla Buri District, Kanchanaburi Province).

[26][27] Within a year of the Second World War, Britain, while facing bankruptcy, retook Burma, Malaya, Singapore and the Straits Settlements.

On 16 January 1946, the British ordered Japanese Prisoners of War to remove a four-kilometre stretch of rail between Nikki (Ni Thea) and Sonkrai.

On 24 June 1949, the portion from Kanchanaburi to Nong Pla Duk (Thai หนองปลาดุก) was finished; on the first of April 1952, the next section up to Wang Pho (Wangpo) was done.

Finally, on 1 July 1958, the rail line was completed to Nam Tok (Thai น้ำตก, 'waterfall', referring to the nearby Sai Yok Noi Waterfall) The portion in use today is some 130 km (81 mi) long.

The line was abandoned beyond Nam Tok Sai Yok Noi;[34][29] the steel rails were salvaged for reuse in expanding the Bang Sue railway yard, reinforcing the Bangkok–Ban Phachi Junction double track, rehabilitating the track from Thung Song Junction to Trang, and constructing both the Nong Pla Duk–Suphan Buri and Ban Thung Pho–Khiri Rat Nikhom branch lines.

Since the upper part of the Khwae valley is now flooded by the Vajiralongkorn Dam,[21] and the surrounding terrain is mountainous, it would take extensive tunnelling to reconnect Thailand with Burma by rail.

Japanese soldiers, 12,000 of them, including 800 Koreans, were employed on the railway as engineers, guards, and supervisors of the POW and civilian labourers.

[37][38][3] During the initial stages of the construction of the railway, Burmese and Thais were employed in their respective countries, but the number of workers recruited was insufficient.

In early 1943, the Japanese advertised for workers in Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies, promising good wages, short contracts, and housing for families.

When that failed to attract sufficient workers, they resorted to more violent methods, rounding up civilians, including children and imprisoning them, especially in Malaya.

[42] Those left to maintain the lines after the completion of the Death Railway suffered from appalling living conditions as well as increasing Allied bombing.

In Thailand, 3,000 British soldiers left Changi by train in June 1942 to Ban Pong, the southern terminus of the railway.

Life in the POW camps was recorded at great risk by artists such as Jack Bridger Chalker, Philip Meninsky, John Mennie, Ashley George Old, and Ronald Searle.

[51] Allied soldiers were often given more freedom than their civilian counterparts, to play guitar or accordion, or lead a group sing-along, or request camp comedians to tell some jokes or put on a skit.

[52][53] In addition to malnutrition and physical abuse, malaria, cholera, dysentery and tropical ulcers were common contributing factors in the death of workers on the Burma Railway.

[37] A lower death rate among Dutch POWs and internees, relative to those from the UK and Australia, has been linked to the fact that many personnel and civilians taken prisoner in the Dutch East Indies had been born there, were long-term residents and/or had Eurasian ancestry; they tended thus to be more resistant to tropical diseases and to be better acclimatized than other Western Allied personnel.

Another group, numbering 190 US personnel, to whom Lieutenant Henri Hekking, a Dutch medical officer with experience in the tropics was assigned, suffered only nine deaths.

Hellfire Pass in the Tenasserim Hills was the largest rock cutting on the railway, built in a remote area, without appropriate construction tools by Chinese, Thai, Malay, and Tamil civilian prisoners and Allied soldiers.

[78] The mass graves of the Southeast Asian civilian dead were exhumed from along the rail line and beside former rest camps for reburial at Wat Thaworn Wararam, a Buddhist temple in Ban Tai, Thailand in the 1950s.

[79][80] Three cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) are for the Allied military personnel who died on the Burma Railway.

The largest of these is at Hellfire Pass (north of the current terminus at Nam Tok), a cutting where the greatest number of people died.

Flanagan's 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North centres on a group of Australian POWs and their experiences building the railway, and was awarded the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

James D. Hornfischer's book Ship of Ghosts: The Story of the USS Houston, FDR's Legendary Lost Cruiser and the Epic Saga of Her Survivors depicts the construction of the railway from the point of view of the survivors of the heavy cruiser USS Houston, which was sunk at the Battle of Sunda Strait in 1942.

The Death Railway Interest Group (DRIG) is a Malaysian NGO that leads on the collection of Asian survivor accounts in Malaysia and Thailand, working to update records and presenting these at Australian and New-Zealand based humanitarian events.

[98] In 2016, R.AGE, the youth news and lifestyle platform of The Star (Malaysia) interviewed one of the last-known Asian survivors in "Surviving Thailand's infamous 'Death Railway': Arumugam Kandasamy".