This Infamous ‘Death Railway’ Station, Built by Forced Labor From Prisoners of War and Civilians in World War II, Was Just Revealed in Thailand

The Nithe Station, usually submerged under a reservoir, will be accessible this summer as officials drain the site to perform dam maintenance

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

June 22, 2026 3:14 p.m.

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An infamous depot along Thailand’s so-called “Death Railway,” a former train line built under perilous conditions by Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and regional laborers during World War II, has—for a limited time—emerged.

Once a major stop along the 257-mile-long railroad that connected Thailand (then Siam) with Myanmar (then Burma), the Nithe Station has been largely unreachable for decades, submerged beneath a reservoir in the country’s western Kanchanaburi province.

Occasional dry spells have lowered water levels enough to expose parts of the historic site, but its remains have never been seen as clearly as they are today. The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand recently drained the reservoir to perform maintenance on the Vajiralongkorn Dam, offering researchers a short window to travel to and study the exposed infrastructure.

Historians are flocking to the station equipped with old aerial photographs and metal detectors before seasonal rains and the dam’s finished maintenance may submerge the station again by August.

“I’ve been to Nithe Station three times in the past, but the water level has always been too high to actually really appreciate the fantastic offerings that it has with the remaining infrastructure and the layout of the railway itself,” Martyn Fryer, an independent Australian researcher whose grandfather died as a POW working on the railroad, tells the Associated Press’ Anton L. Delgado.

The Thailand-Burma line was built over the course of about a year—between 1942 and 1943—by some 60,000 POWs primarily from Australia, the United States, United Kingdom and Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), along with hundreds of thousands of civilians from across Asia. Conditions were deadly and the mortality rates were high: an estimated 12,500 POWs and 75,000 civilians died during construction, primarily from maltreatment, starvation, overwork and disease.

“Your heart stops. You feel dizzy and sick. You think you’re going to piss yourself and then you feel the pain. Something hit me in the spine and I knew it was a rifle butt,” Private Reginald Twigg, a British POW who survived the construction of the railroad, told Warfare History Network’s Mark Simner in 2018. “I weighed about seven stone [98 pounds] by this time and my bones were jutting just below my skin. Then there was a second thud as my legs gave way, a rifle butt to my head.”

Designs for the railway were set in motion following the Battle of Midway in June 1942, which disrupted Japan’s ability to transport supplies to then-Burma in advance of a planned invasion of India. Traveling through Thailand’s mountainous terrain was not an easy proposition, requiring the construction of some 600 bridges and hundreds of viaducts and embankments. More than 100 forced-labor camps were set up along its planned length and laborers worked simultaneously to complete different sections of the line.

“The Japanese will carry out [their] schedule and do not mind if the line is dotted with crosses,” wrote Brigadier Arthur Varley, an Australian POW who worked on the railroad, in his diary, according to records from the National Museum of Australia.

The railroad in its entirety has been out of commission since the war’s end. A select few sites along the route, including Hell Fire Pass and the Wang Pho Viaduct, have become memorials and tourist destinations.

For the researchers traveling this summer to Nithe Station, research is at top of mind.

“It is a good opportunity for us to do some surveying,” Andrew Snow, a researcher with the Thailand–Burma Railway Center, tells the AP. “When you’re dealing with relatives of people that worked on the railway, it’s always nice to be able to show them the areas that maybe their relatives worked on.”

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.