Laying the tracks of remembrance
Railway setting plan for wartime PoW statue. Tony Henderson reports
A railway setting is to be created for a statue which commemorates a North East soldier and fellow prisoners of war who were enslaved by their Japanese captors to build a line between Burma and Thailand during the Second World War.
Many perished from starvation, disease and brutal ill-treatment in the construction of the infamous Burma-Siam “Death Railway”.
One of the PoWs, Len Gibson from Sunderland, survived and wrote a book about his experiences, which inspired Daft as a Brush cancer care charity founder Brian Burnie to commission the statue which now stands in North Marine Park in South Shields.
The statue was unveiled in the park in December 2025, and now Brian has recruited Metro operator Nexus and Durham-based civil engineers MGL Group to produce a railway landscape for the sculpture.
The aim is to finish the project in time for the annual VJ Day (Victory over Japan Day) in August, when an opening ceremony will be held.
Nexus will provide track and sleepers and a spokesman for MGL Group said: “We will be providing the engineering and the earthworks work to enable the laying of the tracks.”
Brian said: “It will be a very moving piece of work.”
He financed the artwork by sculptor Ray Lonsdale, who works from South Hetton in County Durham and also created the First World War Tommy statue which is sited at Seaham.
Ray said that the South Shields statue “brings to the fore” the story of the “Forgotten Army” which fought in the Far East and that of the PoWs such as Len Gibson.
The statue depicts Len, who made a guitar from waste wood during his captivity to keep up the spirits of his fellow prisoners, handing the instrument to a Burmese boy.
Mr Burnie said: “Handing over the instrument is a symbol of peace and forgiveness, as Len was released from captivity to come home.
“This wonderful statue by Ray Lonsdale will be a lasting tribute to all those who never came home and to those veterans who suffered so much.”
Len died in 2021, aged 101, just days before the official launch of the book he wrote on his three and a half years in captivity, titled Len Gibson: A Wearside Lad in World War II.
The Burma-Siam Railway was the backdrop to the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai, which won seven Academy Awards, and the 2013 film The Railway Man, starring Colin Firth and based on the autobiography of prisoner Eric Lomax.