tter for the environment, a group of European high-speed rail companies claimed Monday. Eurostar, Germany's Deutsche Bahn AG and France's SNCF joined Dutch, Austrian, Swiss and Belgian train companies to form a rail alliance, Railteam, that aims to make international train bookings far easier and simpler by building a single online reservation system.
They want to attract at least 25 million travelers by 2010 -- 10 million more than now -- taking a 5 percent chunk out of the short-haul airline market by promoting four-hour business trips and up to six-hour leisure journeys across western Europe.
They said rail travel can and will compete with low-fare airlines such as Ryanair and easyJet that have revolutionized European travel by encouraging people to fly more often and take weekend trips away.
"People can go anywhere on the network and get there more quickly than air. We do believe people will choose to make those journey because it's more environmentally friendly," said Eurostar Chief Executive Richard Brown.
"Our fares are already a lot more competitive than most travelers understand," he said. "One of the objectives of having the Railteam (booking) broker is to have that information on those fares easily available to all passengers so they can make a direct comparison on a single Web site, which isn't possible now."
Cheap fares will be available on the joint booking system, the companies said. SNCF Chief Executive Guillaume Pepy said at least one-tenth of French fares are offered at the lowest prices and that can be as many as 100 seats on double-decker trains that carry 1,000 passengers.
Lower-stress, lower carbon emission rail journeys are already attracting people away from airlines, the rail companies claim, after extra security checks lengthened lines at airports.
Eurostar, which runs trains from London to Paris and Brussels, said it already saw a 39 percent jump in the first three months of this year for sales of tickets that connect its services to French high-speed services that bring travelers to the Mediterranean and the Alps.
It said more corporate clients have been asking them to compare the carbon footprint of train and air travel and have calculated that their trains, on average, release 10 times less CO2 than flying. Eurostar is also aiming to make its trains carbon neutral, offsetting emissions that it can't reduce.
The western European high-speed rail network already links 100 cities and 120 million people, from Paris to Berlin and London to Vienna, but many travelers are unaware that they can travel abroad by train -- and many are unable to find information on rail links, prices and bookings outside their own country.
Railteam aims to change that -- but slowly. From 2009, it plans to offer point-to-point tickets that could be bought over the Internet. Timetables will be sent by text message. If travelers miss a connection, their tickets will let them take the next available train.
Changing the ticket distribution system will cost euro30 million (US$40.5 million), the companies said, but it will provide information and prices for all train journeys -- high speed and normal rail -- in France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.
Business travelers will get many of the trappings of air travel: business lounges and eventually "trainmile" points for frequent travel.
By 2020, the high-speed network should stretch to Spain and Italy as mountain tunnels are completed. In November this year, Eurostar trains in Britain will speed up to 208 miles per hour (335 kilometers per hour) as a faster line is laid.
A rapid link between Belgium and the Netherlands will come onstream next year and one between Brussels and Cologne, Germany, will cut journey times in early 2009.
