Seven countries have agreed to link their high-speed rail networks to make intercity travel across Europe cheaper and easier.

Railteam will compete with budget airlines, offering return fares from £69 for trips such as London to Amsterdam, Cologne or Frankfurt.

For the first time travellers will be able to book tickets through to destinations in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria with one payment on a single website, Railteam.eu.

At present booking journeys beyond Paris and Brussels is a complex exercise in which passengers must compare different countries’ timetables and may be required to buy several tickets.

If they miss connections because their train is running late, they have to book again, and often have to buy another ticket.

Under a new scheme called Hop on the Next Train, they will be able to catch the next service, even if they have bought the cheapest nonchangeable ticket.

The five main Railteam hubs – Lille, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt and Stuttgart – will have English-speaking staff dedicated to ensuring that passengers make the connections.

The timetables will be adjusted to make sure that passengers typically have to wait only 15 minutes when changing trains.

Guillaume Pépy, the chairman of Eurostar and chief executive of SNCF, the French state-owned train company, said: “We want to make people feel as if they are in their home country wherever they are on the Railteam network. We will reduce the stress of travel, making it easier to find a platform and providing staff who speak your language.” Railteam will initially offer information only on its website but will start selling tickets from next year and will guarantee to offer the cheapest fare between any two stations.

The alliance will take advantage of the rapidly growing network of European high-speed lines, including several missing links due to be completed within a year. Eurostar trains will switch from Waterloo to St Pancras on November 14 and will run at about 185mph (300km/h) almost all the way to the Channel Tunnel, reducing the journey time from London to Paris by 20 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes.

The lines from Brussels to Amsterdam and Cologne are also being upgraded, and France is extending its fast TGV lines to Rennes and Nantes. In 2009 the network will extend through the Pyrenees to Spain.

Negotiations are under way to allow the expanding Spanish and Italian high-speed networks to join Railteam.

Mr Pépy set a target of 25 million passengers using high-speed trains for international journeys by 2010, up from 15 million last year.

Frequent travellers will be able to collect “train miles” anywhere on the network to gain discounts on future journeys.

The Railteam logo, unveiled yesterday in Brussels, shows a map of Europe superimposed on the slanting nose of a high-speed train.

The map cuts Britain off in the Midlands, perhaps because of the absence of high-speed lines apart from the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, rebranded High Speed One recently.

The Government will publish a 30-year strategy for the railways this month that will say that Britain may need High Speed Two, a new 185mph line between London and Scotland via the West Midlands. The strategy will stop short of promising to pay for the line.

The first section would not be ready until 2020 at the earliest, by which time the rest of the European high-speed network will have tripled from 5,000km (3,100 miles) to 15,000km.

Richard Brown, chief executive of Eurostar, said that it would retain its £59 cheapest return fare to Paris and Brussels after High Speed One opened. He said: “We will keep fares low to attract more people from airlines.”

He predicted that Eurostar would carry ten million passengers a year by 2010, up from 7.8 million last year. The company was considering running direct trains to Lyons, Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and, after 2010, to Amsterdam.

Mr Pépy said that passengers using the Railteam network would generate, at most, a quarter of the carbon dioxide emissions of those making the same journey by air.

“Our goal is to make the train the natural choice for every European business journey under four hours and for every leisure journey under six hours,” he said.

The seven alliance partners have agreed to handle complaints about one another’s services, meaning that passengers will no longer be told to contact a foreign operation when seeking compensation.