Chapter 15 - The River Kwae Noi

Summary

Running by the town of Banpong flows this country's second largest river, the Mae Khlaung. In the neighbourhood of the town it is over 100 metres wide. About 50 km upstream from Banpong is the town of Kanchanaburi. The prefectural office is here: in those days it was a small town with a population of 3,000. Near it the Mae Khlaung (also known as the Kwae Yai) has a confluence with another river. On the one hand, the River Kwae Yai flows down without a break from the mountains to the North, on the other, the River Kwae Noi has its source to the north-west in the neighbourhood of the Three Pagodas Pass on the Burmese frontier. The two run a distance of over 250 km and the river-basins’ areas are calculated to be respectively 7,000 and 8,000 square km in extent. The river-basins are in mountainous jungle, it is a very rainy area and so in the rainy season there are many flash-floods and, the rivers being narrow upstream the water-level rises four to five metres a day, and at Kanchanaburi in the broad area of the confluence the volume of water rises in a short time, unbelievably, to 300 tons per second: the river widens and the overflow becomes like a gently flowing reservoir. Because the Thai-Burma Railway's route was aimed at the Three Pagodas Pass the River Mae Khlaung had to be crossed. Near the confluence, the river was some hundreds of metres wide at the time but although it was not deep the river-bed was silted up and a river-crossing there would not do, so the railway route planned to cross the Mae Khlaung about 2 km upstream of the Kwae Noi.

The route, having crossed the Kwae Yai, bent round to the left into the Khao Poon area on the bank opposite the confluence. The river then bent round right and the route ran back upstream on the northwest bank of the Kwae Noi.