Chiang Mai Station

It took 26 years to connect Bangkok to Chiang Mai by rail, and the final obstacle was formidable: carving Thailand’s longest tunnel through solid granite. The Khun Tan Tunnel consumed 11 years, over 1,000 lives, and outlasted a change of kings: construction halted when German engineers were arrested during WWI, then resumed under Italian supervision. When Chiang Mai Station finally opened on January 1, 1922, it marked the end of a 751-kilometer journey that had begun in 1896. Today’s sleeper trains make the trip in under 13 hours.

The German engineer who ran the project, Emil Eisenhofer, never really left: his ashes are interred above the tunnel’s entrance to this day. His workforce came mostly from Laos and northeastern Thailand, and by some accounts many of them were opium users who took the job partly because their wages came supplemented with the drug. Malaria, cholera, and the occasional tiger did the rest of the damage that the granite didn’t.

The tunnel also carries a small engineering joke: it was originally bored wide enough for standard gauge track, before Thailand settled on the narrower meter gauge used today, leaving noticeably more headroom inside than the trains passing through it actually need. Khun Tan Station, at the tunnel’s northern mouth, is the highest railway station in the country at 578 meters. Everything about the crossing took longer, cost more, and claimed more lives than planned, except, apparently, the tunnel itself, which ended up larger than it needed to be.