Britain is not the only country to have decimated its regional railways.Nevertheless, there is wide agreement that many people who now travel by air or road will in future travel by rail. The big opportunities are where cities can be linked in less than three hours.After Japan's Shinkansen Bullet Trains were introduced in 1964, several domestic air routes were abandoned. Second, overall track mileages are continuing to shrink: despite the TGV and ICE, lines are being closed across France and Germany. It will never be worth building a high- speed track across North America or Australia, and we will never see a high-speed Trans-Siberian Railway. First, even trains travelling at 200mph cannot compete over long distances with planes moving at three times that.

There was little doubt that his real concern was that a 200mph line linking Dallas, San Antonio and Houston would do great damage, even to one of the most efficient airlines in the US. Mr Kelleher would, it seems, agree with Bill Vantuono, managing editor of Railway Age in New York, that "given the choice, the travelling public will opt for the railroad".Does this mean that the railway is about to have a second golden age, and that airlines will be driven to the wall by a revived Santa Fe or Canadian Pacific? Well, up to a point, but high-speed trains have to overcome big handicaps to compete with planes. He also claimed high-speed rail trains were unsafe - even though not one person has ever been killed on one. Why? In part, strangely, because of the American reaction to the high-speed network. Though the TGV ultimately failed on funding, it was badly damaged by a massive opposition campaign by SouthWest Airlines.Herb Kelleher, SouthWest's chief executive, indicated to the Texas legislature that if the rail line was built he would move his head office out of Dallas.

The idea is to create a partnership that would be ready to storm the growing market for high-speed trains outside Europe. An American attempt to build a TGV line has collapsed, yet the rail-obsessed Euros believe they can export ever more sophisticated trains. It was an ignominious end for the first attempt to establish a true high-speed rail network in the US. Last week, GEC-Alsthom, the Anglo-French builder of the TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) and the Eurostar trains, anounced it was talking to its rival Siemens, which makes Germany's Inter City Express. L ast autumn plans to build a high-speed rail network in Texas collapsed. The state government, which had awarded a 50-year franchise to a consortium called Texas TGV, withdrew the licence after the group failed to secure the first slug of private finance.

They don't realise most people don't know one insurer from the next.". You don't have to play musical chairs with people."To Mr Wolsford, however, the phenomenal success of multi-millionaire Peter Wood's Direct Line, with its distinctive red telephone brand, has demonstrated how much insurers need to learn about marketing, in particular "Insurers think their brand is their name," he said. They needed people from outside to say they could do a much better job." He had to import staff who had worked at companies such as Marks and Spencer, Virgin Airlines, George Wimpey and McDonnell-Douglas.David Prosser, a graduate who became chief executive of Legal & General after wide City experience, said: "Of my top 20 senior managers, at least half are from outside."But Jim Stretton, a graduate and actuary who joined Standard Life 30 years ago and is now chief executive, said: "You need to look outside, but you can do that with long-term Standard Life employees. And as a spokesman for Sun Alliance's Mr Taylor points out: "You have to remember that far fewer people now of an age to run companies went to university 40 years ago than would do today."However, Richard Gamble, the non-graduate chief executive of Royal Insurance who arrived from British Airways, agrees with the DTI report that insurers can be too in-bred."When I became the first ever outsider to go straight on to the Royal board, I found that they had made a profit every year for 145 years and were content.

"Because so many people in insurance have never worked anywhere else," explains David Worsfold, editor of Post Magazine, the insurance weekly, "they have this terrible lemming-like tendency. When in the early 1980s endowment mortgages were about to boom, all the life insurers to a man dropped their medical questionnaires to build business fast. So you had brokers going round hospitals signing up death-bed cases for life assurance - a disaster."Mr Worsfold added: "The same happened when they all rushed into estate agency and mortgage indemnity insurance and lost vast sums."However, of the seven top quoted insurers and Standard Life - the largest mutual - only one, Sun Alliance, is run by a non-graduate, Roger Taylor. He has never worked anywhere else.Britain's largest insurer, the Prudential, is now headed by Peter Davis, who has no degree but an impressive previous record as chairman of the media group Reed International.So the picture at the very top is more complicated than the DTI report, written by industry secondees, suggests.