LONDON (Bloomberg) — Eurostar Group Ltd., the operator of high-speed trains through the Channel Tunnel, will spend £700 million ($1.1 billion) to buy 10 new expresses and add routes in a bid to fend off competition from Deutsche Bahn AG.

Eurostar, which currently runs trains from London to Paris and Brussels, will begin an overhaul of its fleet next year and purchase extra 900-seat units from Siemens AG that are able to reach speeds of 198 miles per hour, it said today.

The revamp was announced 12 days before Deutsche Bahn runs a test train to London as a prelude to beginning services in 2013. Eurostar said its new stock will be delivered from 2014, allowing it to offer destinations including Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt, cities Deutsche Bahn has also said it may serve.

"We're looking at which routes to do first, at the big markets where we can make money," chief executive officer Nicolas Petrovic said in an interview. "If Deutsche Bahn does a fantastic job we might reconsider our options. But we're used to competition — we've been competing with airlines for 16 years."

The Siemens trains will have 20 percent more capacity than existing Eurostar units and journey times between London and Paris will be cut to "just over two hours," the company said.

Eurostar is bracing for competition on routes through the Channel Tunnel to London's St. Pancras station after the European Union introduced rules requiring track owners to grant access to new operators for cross-border, high-speed services.

Deutsche Bahn said last month that it aims to begin a service linking the UK capital with cities in western Germany. To do so it must win authorisation from Britain and France to operate non-standard trains via the 30-mile subsea link, and test run to demonstrate the safety case will be performed on October 19.

Eurostar's main aim is to win a bigger slice of the market for travel between southeast England and the near continent, in which 10 million people currently opt to fly, Petrovic said. It might also run trains to the south of France and Switzerland, with a trip to Geneva taking around five hours, he said.

The e320 trains ordered from Siemens will be a variant of the German manufacturer's Velaro D and similar to the ICE or InterCityExpress mark 4 model that Deutsche Bahn plans to operate through the tunnel.

Unlike the DB trains, though, the e320s will be long enough at 400 metres not to require exemption from existing standards on evacuation procedures.