The renaissance of rail owes much to Eurostar, the cross-Channel shuttle that carries over 70 per cent of Paris-bound air and rail traffic from London, and has renewed enthusiasm for cross-border trains.

And journeys don’t stop at Paris – Rail Europe, the UK-facing ticket agency for the French railways received two million visitors to its website last year and expects double that in 2006.

One new feature that is expected to boost traffic to the Rail Europe website is the availability of iDTGV tickets on its site. The concept launched in France about a year ago, probably because French rail is facing increasing competition from low cost airlines. The tickets cost as little as €19 if you book far enough ahead, and can be booked up to four month's in advance, compared to three months ahead for normal TGV services.

iDTGV services take over entire trains running on routes south from Paris, including Avignon, Marseille, Nice, Cannes, Bordeaux and Toulouse. There are between one and two iDTGV services on each route per day and the trains are split between two carriage types - iDzen and iDzap. The former are quiet carriages where mobile phones are banned and passengers can buy €2 "sleep kits" containing eye mask, ear plugs and inflatable pillow. In iDzap you can rent a games console (€6) or DVD player (€9.50) to use with headphones and wll soon be able to rent MP3 players.

The services are clearly aimed at younger leisure travellers, as they also have a bar, disco and buffet car offering French, Italian and Japanese food, but unless you were a capable French speaker, they were difficult to book using the French railways website. Now there is an Engligh language site annexed to the main rail Europe site, www.raileurope.co.uk/idtgv, which is fun, straight forward and has useful features like a currency converter and also links to a Eurostar booking page for travel starting in the UK.

Also testament to this growing trend is the popularity of rail travel bible, The Man in Seat 61. The site carries information on train journeys from Fes to Fort William and makes money from the customers it directs to rail agencies to purchase tickets, but nevertheless it remains fanatically objective. Set up as a hobby (albeit now a reasonably lucrative one) by rail enthusiast Mark Smith, it received a record 220,000 visitors in January 2006.

For this new breed of train twitchers, the romance of rail isn’t the sole driving factor. Growing environmentalism has played its part. Michael Birtles, managing director of independent rail travel agency, European Rail, says: “Growing concern among consumers for the environment has driven a lot of people towards train travel.”

Rail Europe media relations manager, Peter Mills agrees: “There’s no doubt that environmental considerations are influencing people’s travel choices nowadays. Train travel is the green option.”

They could also become the economical option if industry analysts are proved right. European low cost flights are under threat from a double blow of an anticipated carbon emission tax and further consolidation of low cost carriers, which could consign budget flights to the history books.

“We cannot justify on the environmental front flying so many half-empty flights and we cannot justify flying from every regional UK airport to every European hub,” says Aito director and managing director of Sunvil Holidays, Noel Josephides. He continues: “Once growth stops – and, let’s face it, the no-frills carriers can’t even give away flights currently, prices will inevitably go up. Then you have the cost of fuel to take into consideration and, hopefully, the consumer will become more environmentally aware.”

But can rail travel replace air travel? “If you’re going to southern Spain then fair enough, rail is not going to compete with flights”, says Mills of Rail Europe, “but for southern France, say Provence, you can’t beat the train. It takes six hours with Eurostar via Paris to Avignon, which is no more than the plane by the time you have schlepped to an airport in Essex, then caught a train or bus at the other end.”

But what about booking that Provence rail trip? A decade ago you would have required a specialist rail agency unless you were a French speaker and rail boffin, but now you can do it in five clicks on www.eurostar.com – the channel through which Eurostar now receives 30 per cent of its bookings. It’s well below Ryanair’s 95 per cent online bookings, but there’s a reason for that, says Alan Heywood, managing director of Ffestiniog Travel, a rail specialist that has been running for over 25 years. “For a simple London-Paris ticket you may as well book online, but for more complex journeys you need help. A lot of foreign railway administrators deal only in their language, and the more complex the journey, the more people are going to want to talk about it, like whether they’ll get a meal onboard, or where the station is in relation to the town centre. We can tell them this from our own experience.”

The nine staff at Ffestiniog include rail enthusiasts and former railway employees. When I spoke to Mr Heywood he’d just spent 30 minutes on the phone to a rail novice about the Balkans. “I’ve done the Balkans and know the pitfalls of crossing the border from Croatia to Bosnia,” he says. “You can’t get Bosnian money outside the country, but I reassured him that although the train gets in at 5.30pm, the bank nearby doesn’t shut until 7pm.”

Heywood’s expertise don’t come free. The decision by rail operators to cut commissions paid to agents from 10 per cent to around five per cent means most rail agencies now charge for their services – eight per cent of the sale (to a maximum of £25) in the case of Ffestiniog. If you’re short of time or need expert guidance this is a great option, but there’s a certain satisfaction to be had from booking a train journey yourself, either online or over the phone.

It’s not like booking a short break and flight – Google and Lastminute.com won’t help with most international train journeys (Lastminute sells only Eurostar and domestic UK rail tickets). Even the international booking site affiliated to The Trainline, the leading UK agent, is limited to European rail passes or tickets for Amtrak, the US rail network.

For London to Paris and Brussels and some trips in France, Belgium and The Netherlands, you can book with Eurostar, but for journeys through France to Spain, Italy and Switzerland, you need to go though Rail Europe or Voyages SNCF. Voyages SNCF will post tickets to UK addresses – a pertinent point as rail travel still requires a paper ticket as proof of purchase. Says Rod Maton, managing director of rail specialists, International Rail: “Scandinavia is playing with e-ticketing but rail is really behind the times – we’re a good ten years away from e-ticketing for rail in Europe.”

To the web savvy generation booking online may sound easy, but some fall at the first hurdle. “The feedback I get from Voyages SNCF is that people can’t find the English language button and are put off because they can’t speak the language,” says Smith.

Smith uses Voyages SNCF over Rail Europe because he says the latter uses less favourable exchange rates when converting Euros to Pound Sterling. He says he saved £8 on two London-Athens returns by booking through Voyages SNCF last year.

When I logged on to Voyages SNCF finding the English language button wasn’t the only obstacle (bottom left). After a fruitless 30 minutes of probing for London-Rome ticket prices on Voyages SNCF, a £25 fee to a specialist rail agency and five minute’s on the phone to a knowledgeable train buff was looking pretty appealing.

For starters, the Voyages SNCF site won’t let you pay in Pounds Sterling (you are directed to Rail Europe to do this), so while you may benefit from a favourable rate of exchange, you need to do your own calculations to evaluate the cost. Also, unlike airline websites the price doesn’t display until you’ve gone a few clicks into the booking – there’s no BA or Easyjet-style pricing, where the choice of departures are shown with fares so you can select the cheapest option. Rail Europe is better at displaying the price early on in the booking, but wouldn’t display prices for my London-Rome route because it required more than three changes. That said, the site will relaunch in June with improved navigation and easier booking of point-to-point tickets.

Smith says the comparison with airlines is unfair: “It’s a very complex system to tap into. I once heard that there are more station to station options on the rail network in Belgium that there are air to air connections worldwide – plus a train stops many times, unlike planes, and on one journey a seat may be occupied by a number of different passengers on different legs.”

Another difference with booking rail online is that there isn’t an ascending curve in the cost of rail tickets leading up to the date of travel, like Ryanair or British Airways. If you book early you can secure “Prems” fares for French rail travel, says Mills, but once they are sold out the price reverts to a standard fare. Smith says: “On the continent, for example Paris-Madrid, you have to book 14 days ahead to get the cheap €70 tickets, and once they’re gone you go to the full fare of €100.”

Other tips for booking rail online include researching ticket prices in segments, rather than searching for a price for the complete trip. Smith claims that you could save more than €200 by booking the legs of a London-Rome trip individually, i.e. London-Paris then Paris-Rome, rather than as one journey because the system won’t necessarily find the cheapest fares on each sector. It also means you can book in different classes of travel for different legs of the journey – a Leisure Class seat to Paris then a sleeper for the overnight Paris-Rome leg on the Palatino, which leaves Paris Gare de Bercy every evening at 7pm and arrives in Rome at 9:42am.

It’s complexities like this that lead many to buy InterRail passes (Rail Europe still sells around 20,000 passes a year). The all-zones pass lasts for one month and covers most of Europe plus Morocco and Turkey, but excludes the country of which the pass holder is a resident. The pass costs £405, or £285 for travellers under 26, although there are cheaper passes that cover fewer zones.

But Smith believes they are not good value for money: “I’m increasingly thinking that rail passes are a way of getting more money out of overseas visitors. The Trenitalia pass for four days is €50 a day but most people would pay between €22 and €49 per rail journey. Also you have to pay supplements on some passes to travel on faster trains or in a sleeper, say rather than a couchette seat, and you can’t reserve seats online.” Birtles says that the pass is still good value if you’re going to do three or four journeys across Europe, but adds that for Eastern Europe it’s cheaper to pay for each journey.

If you do choose to book journeys individually, there’s a wealth of websites, but just as there’s no single website that will search and book all European flights (yet), there’s no rail equivalent. Booking a rail trip takes extensive research of both commercial and advice websites, like Smith’s, and for every journeys there’s a few sites you should tick off before committing to a purchase.

Rail enthusiast and Business Traveller reporter Alex McWhirter has his own website recommendations: “The benefits of Swiss website, are the simple display and fast loading pages. It also gives lots of information for connections, including platform numbers and transport links to the main stations. The German rail site has an “International Guest” link with English translation and displays masses of detail with tram links and so on to and from the main stations.”

Online isn’t always the best way, says Smith: “For Germany and Scandinavia I use the German telesales, and people forget that large swathes of the world aren’t up to speed with 21st Century technology, like the Egyptian rail system – it doesn’t even have a website.”

In addition, few rail travellers want to carry a laptop on holiday or spend hours scouring towns for internet cafés when they should be gawping at Gothic architecture. A guidebook is a good companion, and none is better than the rail travel tome, the Independent Traveller’s Edition European Rail Timetable. The quarterly title has been produced by Thomas Cook for over 130 years and lists train schedules across Europe, as well as what to take, international bank holidays, travel phrases, domestic rail passes, visas, and cruise and ferry sailings.

In short there’s no quick answer or ultimate website for booking rail travel. If money is no issue, the experience of a rail specialist is steadfast and reassuring, but if you’re penny pinching or take satisfaction from trawling the internet in search of that Holy Grail of rail tickets, your ticket is out there somewhere. But, the same rules apply as any Easyjet flight – just don’t ask the passenger in the seat next to you what they paid.

Need to know

www.raileurope.co.uk : for European rail starting in France
www.seat61.com: for independent advice and links to rail sites
www.voyages-sncf.com: for European rail starting in France and domestic France travel
www.eurostar.com: for Paris, Brussels and selected French destinations
www.bahn.de: for German rail
www.europeanrail.com: rail specialist selling tours, passes and point-to-point overseas rail tickets
www.rail.ch: for Swiss rail
www.festtravel.co.uk: rail specialist selling international rail tours, short-breaks, passes and point-to-point overseas rail tickets
www.thomascookpublishing.com: for the Independent Traveller’s Edition European Rail Timetable
www.thalys.com: for high-speed Belgium-Holland-France-Germany links
www.internationalrail.com: rail specialist selling tours, passes and point-to-point overseas rail tickets

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