Guest Speaker Bill Traill  is chairman and founder of the of the Border Rail Action Group  which boasts BRAG as its acronym. Brought up in a small rural town  in Gippsland, his earlier interest in rail services was cultivated by hanging out as a kid in the freight yards of the local branch line station and observing  the  remarkable volumes and diversity of freight that was observable in that busy rail yard. Trains  then represented a window to his  outside world. Later  he went off to senior secondary school in Melbourne and commuted back and forth to Maffra –  by train of course. Geography was his favourite subject, and the efficient transporting of goods in the modern economy became a  special sub interest. In the Melbourne university commerce course  there was a subject called economic geography which he absolutely devoured and later taught for half of his  professional life. Fast tracking  to  retirement from the Victorian public teaching service in the early 1990s, long haul passenger rail services on the Victorian network came under severe threat from the newly elected Kennett government. Bill became chairman of the Wodonga Trains Group. His rail advocacy interest  was then set in place, and has continued more or less  unabated for over 20 years. BRAG is a recently formed community action group which has evolved out of the gross underperformance of the rail track and associated rail services on the Melbourne/Albury corridor, a situation which has persisted since late 2008, and is still far from resolution.