He's a senior sergeant with a Tom Selleck moustache who was somewhat of a celebrity in 1980s Shepparton, dubbed “radar Ralph” because of the 1800 bookings he averaged a year.

He now advises highway patrols in the North East and today, we are on the Hume with Senior Sergeant Willingham and two Benalla traffic policemen; Leading Senior Constable Larry Piscioneri and Leading Senior Constable Terry Smith.

“What do you think the reputation of Benalla highway patrol is?” we ask.

“I'm sure it's flattering,” says Leading Senior Constable Piscioneri, rolling his eyes.

“I use the term urban myth,” adds Senior Sergeant Willingham.

“But perception is probably a better term.

“You don't do the wrong thing around Benalla because the highway patrol are always there.”

The 800-or-so kilometre Hume is a major thoroughfare for thousands of vehicles every day. Truckies in their semi-trailers, drivers in sports cars, family wagons crammed with kids, as well as the odd drug runner are all on this moving microcosm.

But it is this 80-kilometre undulating section two hours north of Melbourne, lined by paddocks stripped of colour by the sun, that has a bit of a reputation. And most regular users of this particular patch know the drill: do not speed at Benalla.

Take Joanne Marsal, for example. A nurse from Geelong, she often made the trip up north in her 20s to visit a friend in Wangaratta.

“If my dad knew I was driving up that way, he used to say, ‘I don't need to tell you again, you watch yourself [around] Benalla’,” she says.

This is Ned Kelly terrain but for these traffic cops, when it comes to speeding motorists, it is still hanging country.

On this twilight evening, the trucks are thundering past on the Hume and Willingham as Piscioneri and Smith stand by their cop cars with lights flashing beside the highway.

“Truckies – old truckies – say exactly that,” Piscioneri says.

“They say ‘I've heard about you blokes in Benalla’ and I say ‘That's good, mate’. I don't care if they call us that pack of pricks from Benalla. If it saves their lives, I'm happy.”

Piscioneri and Smith have worked together for almost a decade.

They're a double act, a one-two combo with a comedic timing honed from hours on patrol together.

They've seen the good (motorists tooting their horns in appreciation after they nab a speedster), the bad (the crashes) and the ugly (finding bottles of urine beside the road, tossed by truckies who've had no time or desire to stop for a bathroom break).

“I've had one bloke, he was going to an auction and I saw the newspaper up on the steering wheel of the truck and he was circling things he wanted to buy,” Piscioneri says.

“What about your lady with a cup of tea?” he asks of Smith, chuckling.

“Oh, the lady from Brighton,” Smith replies with exaggerated upper-crust emphasis.

“’I wasn't on my phone’, she said. I said, ‘What were you doing then?’ She said, ‘I was drinking a cup of tea’ and I said, ‘I hope you didn't burn your ear’.

“Anyway, that ticket got snatched out of my hand.”

But the excuses quickly get old for this pair.

When it goes bad on the Hume, one-and-a-half tonne cars are pulverised in a split second. Engines tear out and get thrown for metres, frames twist and shred, and hoods crumple like a trampled can of beer. Imagine what it can do to a human being.

Take the deadly crash the pair attended a few years back. A hatchback slammed into the back of a truck and the truck wheel went straight through the car windscreen and into the driver's face.

“I'll never forget it. It was horrendous,” Piscioneri says.

Their humour is an anecdote for moments like these, a shield to keep from being swallowed up by horror.

“We laugh and joke all day every day, pulling over characters and it keeps us close together, bonded. It gets you through.

“And when the job is on you can switch to immediately ‘the job's on, let's go and do it’,” Smith says, snapping his fingers.

Before we took to the highway, we had met at the Benalla Police Station. Walking out of the brick building, we pass plaques etched with half a dozen names including Rennie Page, Brendan Lynch, Simon de Winne and Allan Dickens.

It's not only local people dying on the roads, it's police. Some of those names were of highway patrol members. All were Benalla police officers.

Just last month, First Constable Dee De Leo, who worked most of her short career in Benalla, was killed when a truck driver allegedly ran up the back of her motorbike in Melbourne.

“They've suffered the road trauma with their work mates being killed and they've got an added incentive to do what they do,” Willingham says.

Smith puts it more bluntly. “We'd rather actually go out there and catch people so we don't have to do the horrible stuff,” he says.

Right on cue, Larry launches into another yarn. In this one, he'd intercepted a speeding car and as he was booking the driver on the side of the highway, another car screamed past.

“I look up and this peanut has got his phone up and he's taking a photo of me,” Larry says.

Larry tells the driver to stay put and chases down the other car.

“I go and get bugalugs and I said, ‘What was the go?’

“He goes, ‘That fellow passed me so I got on the phone to the missus and took a photo of you to show he got caught’. So I go, ‘Here's your ticket as well’.”