Ideally, railways is the supposed to be a cheap mode of transport. However, I doubt whether this is true in India. While, second class travel can be considered to be cheap, 1A, 2A and 3A classes are very expensive. There are instances where on certain routes, the 1A and 2A classes are actually expensiver than even air travel. Rail travel may never match the speed of Air travel. Therefore, if a flight takes 2 hours to cover a distance, considering the present state of Indian railways, the equivalent journey on rails will be around 20 hours.
Now there is talk about bullet trains, if AC travel at 80-100 km/hr is expensiver than air travel, I wonder what will be the tarifs...
more... for a train running at 300 km/h? In all probablity, it will be higher than air travel