European rail travel is very much flavour of the moment. Suddenly we have glamorous new rail terminals in Berlin and London (well, soon), new high-speed trainsets like the Pendolinos, new sections of high-speed track, such as the Ashford link and, this month, the high-speed route between France and Germany, which means you can reach the centre of Frankfurt from Paris in under four hours.

Combine this with growing concern over the environmental impact of air travel and it's not surprising that many are talking about how railways are finally offering real competition to the airlines. Eurostar recently calculated that its trains emit a tenth of the carbon dioxide per passenger that a plane travelling the same route would.

But I don't think we're really there yet. Yes, I can now get from my home to my hotel in Brussels in three hours 30 minutes by rail, compared to four hours by air, but rail can only seriously compete with airlines on a handful of other routes. It might be a travel option for me in London, but a company operating in Manchester is not likely to send its executives by train to a meeting in Belgium.

That's not the point, says French rail consultant Peter Mills. We are conditioned by the English experience of rail travel, he argues. In France, where railway staff say a train "will" arrive at a certain time, not that it is  "expected to" or "scheduled to" arrive at that time, the railways have already wiped out air travel on the golden routes (such as Paris to Lyon), and offer stiff competition on many domestic routes. French rail planners used to consider that trains could compete with planes on journeys up to three hours. Now, he says, they are competing on routes of up to four hours.

Maybe, but Vanessa Beesley of Business Travel Direct thinks we've got some way to go. Yes, its Eurostar bookings have shot up in the last few months, with many companies now asking for environmental comparisons. "But not many are mandating train-before-plane policies yet."