Rail travel only commands a small percentage of the outlay of most companies on business travel. The reasons differ from country to country. Some are just too big to make rail a feasible option for many internal journeys.
In the UK, the sheer poor quality of train services in the past 20 years has led business travellers to opt for flying or travel by car.
Where rail has made an impact is in countries, like Belgium, which are too small for a network of domestic flights or in France where considerable investment over many years in a high speed network has promoted rail to first choice on many city to city journeys.
But the rail companies themselves, whether nationalised or privately-owned, are also partly to blame
The old GDS rail booking engine ELGAR creaked along for far too long without a proper update while train companies have been snail-paced, compared with the airlines who are often rivals, in adopting swift easy to use online booking methods.
In the UK, it is only this year that an online rail booking engine aimed at the corporates has fully come onto the market and it is proving immensely popular.
The lack of Management Information (MI) was also a detriment to train travel.
Much of this has now changed. Corporates can book online for train journeys, pick up their tickets without a queue and receive full MI.
But there is yet one more area where the train companies have fallen behind airlines and hotels: revenue management (RM) and yield management. When American Airlines became the first carrier to adopt RM in 1985, many other airlines soon followed.
But it was not until 1992 that the French network, SNCF became the first rail company to introduce the system. Others - but not all - like Eurostar and GNER in the UK have since followed suit.
The first ever Rail Revenue Management and Pricing Conference held this week in London was attended by delegates from rail companies in Sweden France, Belgium and the UK which suggests the benefits of revenue management may be filtering through.
Mr Andrew Markham, senior manager at GNER responsible for commercial planning, said that as GNER could not increase its capacity, it had make better use of its existing services to increase revenue.
Using RM methods, it offered more attractive prices at off peak times, thus persuading more people to go by train. It also simplified its fare structure and offered mix-and-match combinations. In other words it became far more flexible to customer demands – exactly as airlines, both low cost and traditional have done.
The result was in its first year of RM in 2004, GNER's revenue rose by £16.6m.
Mr Markham said train companies were also now collecting far more detailed information about their travellers, not just the train manager counting the number of people in a carriage.
This data included where people were travelling from and to, when and in what class and how often.
This would help forecasting of demand and the setting of prices.
SNCF has already gone further than most by introducing what amounts to a low cost rail operation on its TGV network. iDTGV, launched about a year ago, offers cut price tickets at off peak times, like the afternoon and evening on the Paris-Marseille route
Tickets prices are set by the day according to demand and can only be bought online. So far the scheme has attracted an extra 500,000 passengers to rail.
But what relevance is this to the corporate if train operators are finally making an effort to catch up with airlines?
It may be extremely relevant. More people are travelling on business by rail and that number is likely to increase. In the AirPlus International Travel Management Study, the overwhelming number of travel buyers questioned in Europe said they thought the volume and cost of train travel would be either the same or increase.
In Germany, France and the UK, buyers expected the volume of train trips to increase respectively by 30%, 28% and 25%.
Secondly the short haul map of Europe is changing. More and more high speed train services, like Madrid-Barcelona, Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris and Paris-Frankfurt will open in the next few years, all mounting serious challenges to air transport.
On Eurostar where the train already dominates, the completion of the high speed track in the UK in 2007 will further cut journey times to Paris and Brussels.
If corporates use trains more frequently, they will want deals and good, detailed data is needed for the negotiations.
With many corporates bought into the cheapest price of the day philosophy, train companies will need to be able to offer attractive ands more flexible prices, to these prospective customers – and they will need all the data they can get to do this.
If this begins to happen, trains may at last be moving into the modern era of business travel.