The bamboo railway — called a norry or nori locally — is a flat bamboo platform mounted on two axles with small wheels, powered by a small engine and capable of doing 40 kilometres an hour on the old French-built tracks northwest of Battambang. Rides on the norry have been a fixture of Battambang tourism for twenty years, offering an unusual and genuinely exhilarating way to see the countryside.
The original operation was rebuilt and formalized after the tracks were needed for the rehabilitated national rail network. Today the short tourist section of track carries visitors through rice paddies and small villages on a journey of about six kilometres each way. The ride itself — bouncing and rattling on a flat wooden platform, wind in your face, children waving from rice fields — is the experience, not the destination. Hire through guesthouses or directly at the track near O Dambong village, north of town.