The horizon is crowded with new rail track openings that will treble the size of Europe’s high-speed network to over 15,000km by 2020, dramatically cutting journey times (see below) and reshaping the likely contours of aviation too – not least because railway travel is fair set to restore a slither of much-needed comfort and punctuality to a sector battered by terrorism woes and airport security delays.

This special report doesn’t assume that we’ll all stop flying, but it does suggest that on numerous short-haul routes currently served by budget airlines the railways will gradually take over, assuming they can compete on price. The classic example in this regard is France’s inaugural TGV line between Paris and Lyon. Opened in 1981, it forestalled the ballooning of aviation on that particular route with an environmental benefit that wasn’t even acknowledged at the time – low-carbon electrification based on low-carbon nuclear energy.

Whether or not the French model sketches a wider European future, particularly in central and eastern Europe and the UK, where high-speed railway has only just begun, remains unclear. But it is an intriguing possibility that coincidentally offers a level of comfort that airports and airlines can only dream of.

There are limits to this, of course. Although there will (we estimate) be a return to “slow travel” and even scheduled, transatlantic shipping lines – UK entrepreneur Mark Creasy has just launched a 12-week, one-way bus journey from London to Sydney that wends its way through 20 countries and is claimed to be 50 times more environmentally friendly than flying on a Boeing 747 – business travelers will certainly not stop flying between Europe, the US, Asia and Latin America.

Other unknowns include to what degree Railteam, a marketing consortium of nine high-speed train operators formed earlier this year, will be able to overcome the traditional need to buy several tickets when covering several national borders, invariably adding up to a hefty premium over a cheap flight. The group has already said that on some routes EU competition laws will prevent it from offering common fares, a classic illustration of the unintended consequences of EU legislation.

One woman’s collusion is another man’s fair deal, apparently. Richard Brown, Eurostar chief executive, insists that railways are free to strike bilateral fare agreements. This is exactly the sort of confusion that airlines have never faced – but it is imperative that France’s SNCF, Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, Belgium’s SNCB, the Netherlands’ NS, Austria’s ÖBB and Switzerland’s SBB sort out their collective act. Promisingly, Eurostar is already an exemplar of joint venturedom, being a collaboration of England, France and Belgium, while Thalys is a Franco-Belgian-Dutch-German affair and TGV Lyria is Swiss-French.

Take a liberal dosage of marketing nous, mix with a decent fare structure and serve up with on-board broadband connections, and it’s not difficult to glimpse the potential future of rail in Europe. EB

European developments: The new shape of rail travel

Paris–Strasbourg 2h 20m, and 1h 50m in 2008
Paris–Frankfurt 3h 50m
Paris–Geneva 3h from mid-2009
Brussels–Amsterdam 2h 41m, with plans to reduce to 2h
Basel–Milan 4h 26m, reducing to 3h 26m this year
Barcelona–Madrid 4h 30m; 2h 30m from end of 2007
Madrid–Seville 2h 30m
Milan–Naples High-speed network complete in 2010
Channel Tunnel New UK base and higher-speed links from November, open to other operators from 2010