The Australian, British, Dutch and other allied prisoners of war were required by the Japanese to work 18 hours a day to complete the cutting.

Sixty-nine men were beaten to death by Japanese guards in the six weeks it took to build the cutting, and many more died from cholera, dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion (Wigmore 568).

[3] However, the majority of deaths occurred amongst civilian labourers, whom the Japanese enticed to come to help build the line with false promises of good jobs.

[4] The railway was never built to a level of lasting permanence and was frequently bombed by the Royal Air Force during the Burma Campaign.

(Tom) Morris toured the area in Thailand and resolved to convince the Australian Government that portions of the Thai-Burma Death Railway should be preserved as a historical site.

Thanks to his efforts, the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC) was commissioned in 1984 to make a survey of the railway to choose a suitable site.

Jim Appleby, a SMEC engineer at the Khao Laem dam site on the upper Kwai Noi, did much of the ground work and passed his reports to the Australian-Thai Chamber of Commerce in 1985.

The museum is co-sponsored by the Royal Thai Armed Forces Development Command and the Australian government[5] to commemorate the suffering of those involved in the construction of the railway.