Classic route
Royal Railway Northern Line
Phnom Penh → Battambang · Cambodia
Royal Railway Northern Line in pictures
Photographs by their authors, hosted on Wikimedia Commons · tap through for the licence
- Distance
- 273 km
- Fastest time
- 6 h 50 min
- Average speed
- 40 km/h
- Top speed
- 60 km/h
- Operator
- Royal Railway
- Train
- Veteran ex-Thai Railways diesel railcar
- Countries
- Cambodia
- In service since
- 1932
- Runs
- 1× daily each way
Figures are published values, not live data · corrections log
Cambodia’s 1932 French rice line, silenced by war and revived in 2018, ambles past Tonle Sap paddies to Battambang’s art-deco station.
The French opened Cambodia’s first railway to Battambang in 1932–33 to move Tonle Sap rice, and after decades of war and abandonment Royal Railway coaxed passenger trains back onto the northern line in 2018. A veteran ex-Thai railcar now trundles out of Phnom Penh’s grand 1932 terminus through an unbroken horizon of paddies and sugar palms. Battambang’s shuttered art-deco station still keeps its original clock.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from OpenStreetMap relation 17056375 — the same nodes OpenStreetMap holds for this railway, thinned to within under 25 m of them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 2 m from it
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
Along the way
- Phnom Penh’s 1932 station hall
- Tonle Sap floodplain paddies
- Pursat river country
- Moung Ruessei village platforms
- Battambang’s art-deco terminus
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