2. The railway earned its nickname—the Death Railway—from the suffering the tens of thousands of POWs and cheap local labor went through to construct it, surviving on meager rations, sleeping on lice-infested bamboo mats, and working with ribs clearly visible beneath their browned skin and furrowed brows. Thousands died in the process of building the 250 miles of rail over 15 months, and their makeshift graves dotted the sides of the tracks, before being moved to neatly kept graveyards in Kanchanaburi and two other cemeteries along the route after the war ended. Today, the history is still vivid. One can walk across the bridge late at night and imagine what it was like for those workers as spotlights cast an eerie light of ominous shadows on the green water and the wooden tracks disappear through the dark bushes, like a tunnel towards death. And even now, disaster isn’t only an increasingly distant memory. On one recent morning during my train ride north, the rail’s nickname took on more significance when an attaché to the Greek embassy was crushed beneath the wheels of the train, dying on the spot. Today, only a portion of the original rail line is in operation, reopened in 1956 and taking travelers as far as Nam Tok, two hours from the Burmese border. Recently, the Burmese government announced plans to rebuild its side of the tracks, says Terry Manttan of the Thailand Burma Railway Center and Museum, which is located in Kanchanaburi next to the War Cemetery, where scores of the soldiers who died during construction are buried. Burma’s borders have reopened in certain places recently.