In recent years most of the 100 000 or so visitors each year to the memorial museum have been non-Australian. The comments in the visitors’ book show that the museum’s contents inspire a sympathetic response from people of many nationalities.
The memorial museum is also a place for reflection about the suffering of those who built the railway. Its contemplation desk overlooking the Kwae Noi Valley, the beauty of which many POWs commented on even as they suffered, contains a peace vessel by a former prisoner Peter Rushworth.
The memorial museum provides visitors with an audio guide tour to Hellfire Pass (Konyu cutting) and the walking trail below. On this trail can be found interpretative panels, several cuttings, the sites of the massive Three-Tier Bridge and ‘Pack of Cards’ Bridge, the impressive 7-Metre embankment and Hintok station where trains passed each other.
Though the bridges no longer survive, the landscape reveals the profound difficulties of constructing the railway in this steep and rugged terrain. As much as the memorial museum it testifies to the terrible hardships of the prisoners and rōmusha.
Where the walking trail begins there stands a black stone pyramid-like memorial to all ’who suffered and died’ in 1942–45. Critics claimed that its installation in 2005 had ‘desecrated’ the grave of Dunlop but it forms an effective focal point for Anzac Day ceremonies. It is also less explicitly Christian than the cross which had been used on some previous occasions.