Problems to overcome Timetables, tricky tickets and high prices

At 9.55am every day since December, a German ICE high-speed train has left the Gare de l'Est in Paris headed, via Strasbourg, Karlsruhe and Frankfurt, for Berlin Hauptbahnhof, where - all being well - it pulls in just over eight hours later.

- Jon Henley

Remarkably, the service is the first direct, high-speed, centre-to-centre rail link between the capitals of the EU's two biggest countries. Run by Deutsche Bahn (DB) and France's SNCF, it has been hailed as a milestone in European train travel.

It is not the only new service linking Europe's cities. From next May, the CD ComfortJet, operated by the Czech, German and Danish railways, will carry travellers all the way from Prague to Copenhagen, calling at Dresden, Berlin and Hamburg, in just over 11 hours.

Major routes are being built: a high-speed alpine tunnel linking Lyon and Turin; the Fehmarn Belt Rail Baltica, which will join Tallinn in Estonia to Warsaw via Riga in Latvia and Kaunas in Lithuania.

On the face of it, then, high-speed, long-distance rail travel in Europe seems to finally be taking off. But in fact, fast, efficient cross-border rail services between the continent's major urban centres remain very much a rarity.

Inadequate infrastructure, unwilling operators, incompatible systems, incomprehensible timetabling and (last but not least) impossibly complicated ticketing all ensure that long rail journeys across Europe remain all too often a pastime rather than a practical travel alternative.

Imagine a four-country trip from Barcelona to Marseille, then on to Italy's largest port, Genoa, ending in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.