Rail is facing opportunities that must be the envy of other transport industries. While air and road can also fairly claim that more and more use them, rail can point to other factors which put it ahead of the others.
There is the growing speed of trains and the ever expanding high speed network in Europe; there is the relative lack of hassle compared negotiating airports and travelling by air; there is the lack of traffic jams; and there is, crucially, the environmentally friendliness of travelling by train.
The problem is whether the trail industry is equipped to take advantage of these favourable factors. The answer has to be: not yet.
The first ever Amadeus Rail Forum held late last month in Nice attracted some 60 air, train and agency experts who duly chewed over the problems.
The main - and most obvious - is that rail lacks the distribution facilities that air enjoys. While any GDS will offer the inventory of BA, Lufthansa, Air France KLM and every other major airline in the world, rail does not get the same treatment.
There are historic reasons for this but they seem to have lingered over long. Apart from the fact that most rail travel is domestic (only about 5% is international), the rail industry itself did not seem minded to snap up the business opportunities offered by computers and, more lately, the Internet, in the way that airlines did.
A start has now been made and the inventory of Eurostar will be available on GDSs this summer. Amadeus, which built this facility (although it is available to all GDSs), said a similar one will be available for agents to book UK domestic rail journeys next year.
But that does not go nearly far enough. With the high speed network growing, TMCs want the ability to book through trains from London to Amsterdam or Paris to Rome from one screen, comparing air prices as they go.
As Gillian Gibson, Amadeus' vp multinational customer group, told the Forum content fragmentation was one of the challenges facing TMCs in booking rail.
All rail providers, said Ms Gibson, seemed to have different booking platforms and processes. There are no standard formats or functionality, no integrated displays, no ticketing standards and no common API to access and consolidate rail data – all highly desirable for bookers and travel managers.
An air booking, Ms Gibson said, takes an agent two minutes; a rail booking eight-ten minutes. That is some difference and will eat into an agent's already thin margins.
Rail bookers need, as a matter of urgency, access to full content and a single booking tool. A tool, as Ms Gibson said, which made reservations "quickly, accurately and efficiency." This is not asking for the moon.
And indeed this need becomes more necessary, as both the high speed rail network and the number of business travellers using it expands.
The news last month that seven European rail operators are in talks to provide, eventually, seamless travel between countries and different national rail services shows the way things are moving.
These companies wish to provide the ability for a traveller to travel on his or her journey through different countries on one ticket which would considerably reduce the chore of getting different tickets for different trains.
But the vision can be stretched wider than that. Eric Stokhuyzen, director of Alliances for KLM told the Forum that his airline had both a stake in and a partnership with HSA, the company which will run the high speed trains between Amsterdam and Brussels.
He envisaged integrated timetables, a single ticket and centralised booking. There would be16 trains a day between the cities (all calling at Schiphol) able to carry 14,000 compared with the 1,000 the air service carries.
A traveller could board the plane in New York arrive at Schiphol and take the train to Brussels or on to Cologne or Paris or even switch to Eurostar for London.
More pointedly the train would be operating in conjunction with the plane rather than in opposition.
It's a vision of an integrated transport system on the grandest scale – but it is not beyond reach.