Deutsche Bahn has been given permission to use the Channel Tunnel, but they need time for the Class 407s to be approved. (http://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/materials/industry/imo/velaro_d_en.pdf). Trains won’t start running until 2016. Deutsche Bahn indicates that they want to run trains from London to Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Is this airline competitive?
On a related note, Eurostar is building more trainsets to do the same thing:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_374
That’s something that DB has been trying since 2010. Here’s a video depicting the first ever trip to London. Anyway these type of decisions in Europe tend to take long time to materialise, since there are too many technical details and political wrangling in between.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpzUbj09mi
On the other end, when DB took the ICE to London, it was also providing a service to Eurostar PLC, since their new class 374 are basically a new version of the ICE 3, but based on the Velaro high speed trains built for the Madrid to Barcelona HSL, in fact these new class is a Velaro 2 (withe Spanish & Russian ‘Sapsan’ sets being Velaro 1s)