Could high-speed rail become the business travel option of choice?

Considering what it's about, the High Speed 1 web site loads remarkably slowly. Admittedly, I was accessing it from North America, which meant that the traffic had to go further. Or maybe the long haul link was fine, and it was just the local connection that was the problem. But then, the people behind High Speed 1 would know all about that.

The 186mph High Speed 1 rail line - which takes passengers from London to the Channel Tunnel and beyond - only became fully operational this month. The French have had a high-speed rail link from Paris to the coast since 1994, when the Channel Tunnel opened. On the UK side, a mixture of funding and planning problems made a high-speed link characteristically late.

Initially, there was no such link at all - trains had to plod along at suburban line speeds until 2003, when the first stage of the fast line opened, cutting 20 minutes from the journey. However, that only kicked in at Kent. The addition of the second leg got it all the way to London, shaving off an additional 20 minutes. Now, travellers can get between London and Paris in two hours and 15 minutes.

Our Eurostar contact enthused breathlessly about the green aspects of all this. Normally I take anything that a PR person says with a fistful of salt, but in this case, it was hard to disagree. Terrapass.com's air travel carbon and personal guilt calculator says that a round trip between London's City and the French Charles de Gaulle airports would burn about 118kg of CO2. A trip from London to Paris on the train, on the other hand, will burn through just 11kg of carbon, and 59 pounds of your hard-earned cash. So, all in all, not a bad deal at all for planet or wallet.

There are downsides to taking the train, of course. The British have a history of not being able to run them on time, but things have been changing ever since the first part of the high-speed link opened, says our Eurostar spokesperson. "Punctuality before the first section opened up was 77 per cent, and last year it was 91.5 per cent, and for the first six months of this year it was 92 per cent," she asserts.

There's no doubt that sharing conventional lines can create significant problems for rail travellers. Your correspondent was delayed for hours travelling between New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina on an Amtrak train this autumn, because, perversely, a freight train took precedence over the passenger train that we were on. One messed up local journey can wreak havoc on longer-distance trips. So, with a dedicated high-speed line going from London to Paris, hopefully cross-Channel rail journeys should reach reliability levels of Mussolini-like proportions (it was always said that at least he made the trains run on time).

If we accept the fact that businesses are still largely averse to videoconferencing, we have to work out how to get travellers to long-distance meetings in the most environmentally and cost-effective way possible. As high-speed rail links become more available, they could be the answer. Not only are they more comfortable, but they could be more productive. Wireless Internet access on planes, where it is available at all, is notoriously expensive. But even if there's no Wi-Fi on the train (and more of them offer this service) you can at least use your 3G card, or simply collect your email on your cellphone. This instantly makes better use of a business person's time while in transit.

From an environmental perspective, cross-Channel train journeys are a sweet spot in more ways than one. All plane travel is damaging, but short haul flights are the worst. "Short haul flights are more polluting on a per-mile basis, burning about 0.65lbs of CO2 per mile," warns Tom Arnold, chief environmental officer at TerraPass, which sells travel offset credits to soothe the corporate conscience. On an average airline trip (including long -haul flights), the amount burned is closer to 0.45lbs. "This is because takeoff and landing are the most energy intensive parts of your voyage, and on a short-haul flight, these are averaged over a much shorter distance," explains Arnold.

With high-speed services now operating, there is a greater incentive for travellers to take the train, especially when the other inconveniences are taken into consideration. Travelling to airports and checking in can be time-consuming and cumbersome, especially if taking advantage of low-cost carriers who often operate out of town. And the current paranoia around security makes flights an increasingly tedious process. Every time a trip is taken, it seems that there are yet more hoops to jump through.

Mehdi Morshed, executive director of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, is certainly banking on dissatisfaction with air travel as he moves forward with proposals for a statewide high-speed system. His trains would travel at 220 mph, whisking passengers between major urban centres in the state. He sees trips of 100-500 miles as the sweet spot for high-speed rail, based on data gathered from existing high-speed markets like Europe and Japan. "Lower than that, the automobile becomes more convenient, and with greater distances, airplanes begin to have an edge," he says.

However, while Morshed mulls the possibility of high-speed travel around his state, the UK still faces its own problems. After much political to-ing and fro-ing, the UK still has no dedicated high-speed service beyond London. The idea of a regional Eurostar seems to be dormant, meaning that the further north of London you get, the less attractive rail links become.

However, all is not lost, says Simon Pielow, who left Eurostar to become managing director (he likes the term 'trainvangelist') of Train Chartering. The company charters trains for groups of people who want to turn travel into an event. "We handle transfers, catering, entertainment, and the management of stations," he explains, adding that in some cases, clients have asked him to slow down trips to take advantage of it. "It is a full-service proposal."

The catch: unless you're corporate travel budget is particularly generous - like that of the two Hollywood celebrities who got Pielow to charter a train from Geneva to Hamburg - you'll need a relatively large group. He sets the floor at 250 people to make it economically viable. But if you're going to spend time travelling and saving the planet at the same time, you might as well make a party of it.