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A fresh dumping of snow and gale force winds wrought havoc in Germany on Sunday as harsh winter conditions made for a weekend of travel misery across Europe.
In Germany, the north was worst hit with motorways, other roads and railways made unpassable in places by blizzards, forcing hundreds of people to either spend the night in their cars or abandon them on the road, police said.
"At least when it comes to the north, the situation is dramatic," Maxi Hartung from the German Automobile Association said on rolling news channel NTV. "On the A20 motorway, people have been stuck for hours."
The whole country was under snow, with Leipzig in the east under 29 centimetres (11 inches), nearby Berlin under 27 centimetres while Hamburg in the north-west had 12 centimetres, forecasters said.
Dozens of villages on the Baltic Sea islands such as Ruegen were cut off.
Rail and air travel were also hit, with 61 flights cancelled since midnight (2300 GMT) as of 10:20 am (0920 GMT) at Frankfurt airport, Europe's third busiest, after 255 flights were scrapped on Saturday, a spokesman said.
Workers were battling to keep all three of Frankfurt's runways operational, with travellers lucky enough to be able to take off still subject to delays of around an hour, spokesman Heinz Fass told AFP. Other airports were also hit.
On Friday, Germans were warned to buy enough food and medicines to last for up to four days in the face of a blizzard, and then hunker down at home, avoiding all non-essential travel.
Britain, meanwhile, was suffering its coldest weather for 30 years, with 50 short-haul flights out of London Heathrow cancelled on Saturday, while heavy snow closed Dublin airport for four hours.
In London, the Serpentine outdoor swimming lake in Hyde Park was closed on Saturday for the first time in about 140 years amid icy conditions.
The conditions knocked out weekend sports games -- seven English Premier League football matches were called off and five out of the six Premiership rugby union fixtures were also cancelled.
The unusually harsh conditions are being caused by a rare combination of a depression bringing relatively warm humid air from the Mediterranean north where it has met cold air from the north and east, Michel Daloz from Meteo Franc said.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch weather service warned on Sunday of slippery conditions and snowdrifts on the country's roads, with temperatures on Sunday around freezing point with strong winds.
Dutch National Railways offered a special 40 percent reduction on off-peak travel for the coming three days, calling it a "Zoutkaartje" (Salt Ticket) in reference to low stocks of salt for de-freezing bus, car and bicycle roads.
Heavy rain and melting snow have meanwhile led to flooding in parts of Croatia and neighbouring Bosnia.
