Executive Travel : Rail Service Seeks to Lure Business Travelers : Transportation: Industry believes high-speed trains can compete with airlines.

Business travelers may not realize it, but they are at the heart of the slow but steady move toward high-speed rail service in the United States.

Rail industry experts believe almost any 500-mile trip that can be made by rail in three hours or less becomes a viable competitor to flying, given the delays, weather problems, airport commute times and other factors involved in air travel.

Because statistics show that the bulk of business travel is done on short-haul flights, those customers are ripe to be courted.

The rails, however, are not quite ripe.

Amtrak hopes to have trains capable of hitting 150 m.p.h. between Washington and Boston by 1997. It expects to contract for the rail cars soon.

The company has designated several clusters of cities as candidates for high-speed service. They include a Los Angeles-centered service to Sacramento, the Bay Area, Bakersfield and San Diego; Eugene, Ore., north through Portland and Seattle to Vancouver, Canada; extensions of the existing East Coast service to Albany and Buffalo, N.Y., in the north and to Richmond, Va., Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., in the south; Orlando and Tampa, Fla., to Miami, and Chicago to Detroit, St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Joseph Sillen, director of business development for ABB Traction Inc., one of the companies bidding for the rail car contract on the Boston-Washington route, believes that high-speed rail “absolutely will happen in the next decade.”

The cost for the equipment and for making existing track and grade crossings safe for fast trains could run into the billions. The high price tag remains a formidable obstacle.

“All of high-speed rail is geared to business travel,” Sillen said. “The trains are designed to be an office on wheels--you have the entire journey time to do what you need to do: telephone, fax--there are even little conference rooms,” he said of the Swedish-designed X-2000 train his company is backing.

But while the business travel market is expected to provide the volume to make high-speed rail service profitable, such travel will not be cheap.

In Japan and parts of Europe where high-speed service already exists, Sillen said, ticket prices run just under the cost for air travel on competing routes.