- Our train campain in front pages

- The mudholes plaguing our trains

THIS is what all the fuss is about.

And it is closer to the Border than you might think.

On a straight stretch of track rising from Chiltern train station lurks the bogeyman of the Border’s rail service — mudholes.

This is the reason why train drivers are now threatening to pull the pin on working on the line.

Why they are being injured as they bounce about the locomotive’s cabin.

Why trains are taking up to six hours to travel 300 kilometres, a journey that not so long ago was a three-hour and 15-minute trip.

And why no one can say when V/Line’s full service — three daily trains to Melbourne will resume after a two-and-a-half year absence.

Click play to watch yesterday's train ploughing through the Chiltern mudhole.

Or click play here to watch the whole train rattling over the mudholes.

Here at the top of the rise, what was once rock ballast for the line that carries V/Line’s passenger trains to and from Melbourne is now mud.

Water sits in pools around the concrete sleepers.

The track itself is suspended above a quagmire that looks more like wet cement.

There is no sign of the rock ballast that steadies the line just 10 metres away and even on the neighbouring and immediately adjacent east track.

Concrete sleepers weighing more than 300 kilograms can be moved with little urging.

The patch of muddy track stretches up to 30 metres.

There are more outbreaks, less severe, stretching down the line.

In the distance the afternoon train from Melbourne climbs the hill, silhouetted by blue skies in what has become an early spring for the North East.

It’s dry, no sign of rain — said to be the driving force behind the mudholes.

But as the 330 tonnes of locomotive and carriages approaches the muddy section of track the train slows, the driver steadying himself in the cabin for the jolt that experience has taught him, is sure to come.

The train capable of 115kmh hits the mudhole at 60kmh.

There is an audible thump, the rail itself bounces up and down, to the naked eye and from outside the rail corridor it could be 15cm.

The succession of carriages too bounces their way across the mudhole.

The movement is more than noticeable and even from the relative safety of outside the rail corridor a little unnerving.

Sometime later a driver tells us that they have to really hang on through that patch, that they have now told the Australian Rail Track Corporation — that manages the line, coordinates the trains on the tracks — the speed needs to be cut back to 40km/h.

But according to the drivers this is the better end of the line.

The 70-kilometre stretch from Violet Town and Seymour on the same west track now carries a self-imposed 60kmh speed limit for the V/Line passenger trains.

A train driver says in the past week five new, and significant, mudholes have appeared on that stretch.

The Victorian trainer driver’s union says there needs to be a federal inquiry into how this happened.

In a letter obtained by The Border Mail the union’s NSW branch has written to federal transport minister Anthony Albanese warning that unless things improve drivers could refuse to work on the line.

They pull no punches on how this happened.

“We believe that the safety and well being of our members, passengers and locomotives has been seriously placed in jeopardy over the past several years as a result of the ARTC’s re-sleepering program,” they say to the minister.

“The ARTC need to be held accountable for their maintenance and management of the Melbourne to Sydney rail corridor, and the risks these practices potentially pose to those using the rail corridor.

“Obviously a self-regulatory approach has not worked in this situation, and in the absence of direct and urgent intervention, train drivers may be forced to operate the rail corridor.”

But the minister’s office says they will not respond.

“The Minister has received this correspondence and has already responded to the issues it raises in an earlier letter to the RTBU’s national secretary, Allan Barden,” a spokesman said.

Similarly the ARTC say there is nothing wrong with the track.

“The western track is capable of line speed and other customers are doing that — there are no speed restrictions at all,” the spokesman said.

“Safety is paramount for the ARTC and we would not be running trains if there was any danger.”

But this week a driver, who wished to remain anonymous, said if they ran at line speed, 115km/h for V/Line, the train would be derailed.

In this long-running saga it not only the track that is muddy.