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One of Paris' first 'mass' attractions drawing international interest were, from 1855, the above-mentioned Expositions Universelles that would bring Paris many new monuments, namely the Eiffel tower from 1889. Paris' museums and monuments are by far its highest-esteemed attractions, and tourist interest has been nothing but a benefit to these; The city's most prized museum, the Louvre, sees over 6 million visitors a year. Paris' cathedrals are another main attraction: its Notre-Dame cathedral and Sacré-Coeur basilica. The Historical axis is a line of monuments, buildings and thoroughfares that run in a roughly straight line from the city centre westwards: the line of monuments begins with the Louvre and continues through the Tuileries Gardens, the Champs-Elysées famous for shopping, and the Arc de Triomphe centred in the Place de l'Étoile circus. La Défense business district is dominated by square-shaped triumphal Grande Arche of its own the tall skyscrapers in the Paris urban area. Disneyland Paris is a major tourist attraction with 12 million visitors yearly. Many of Paris' once-popular local establishments have metamorphised into a parody of French culture, in a form catering to the tastes and expectations of tourist capital. The Moulin Rouge cabaret-dancehall, for example.

Paris
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Thalys is a high-seed train network built around the high-speed line between Paris and Brussels. This track is shared with Eurostar trains that go from Paris or Brussels to London via Lille and the Channel Tunnel and with French domestic TGV trains. The system uses two models of trains, the PBA and the PBKA, which both belong to the TGV (train à grande vitesse) family of high-speed trains built by Alstom in France, although they are not identical to domestic TGV sets.

Beyond Brussels, the main cities Thalys trains reach are Antwerp, The Hague, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Liège, Aachen and Cologne. Trains to these destinations run partly on dedicated high-speed tracks (some of these are yet to be built), and partly on older tracks shared with normal-speed trains. Travel time from Brussels (Brussels-Midi) to Paris (Gare du Nord) is normally 1 hour, 25 minutes, for a distance of approximately 300 km. Peak speed is 300 km/h on a dedicated high-speed railway track.

The network plans to continue the line past Cologne to Frankfurt had to be abandoned because of the power the Thalys trainsets generate when operating under the 15 kV voltage system used in Germany is insufficient for operation on the Cologne-Frankfurt high-speed rail line

Paris
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