A heavy late-winter snowstorm battered northwestern Europe on Tuesday, causing widespread travel chaos with the cancellation of hundreds of flights, suspension of train services and huge traffic jams.

The unseasonable snowfall - coming only eight days before the official start of spring - also knocked out power to thousands of people in France and left hundreds of motorists stranded in their cars.France was worst affected but Germany, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands also reported major disruptions.Frankfurt Airport, Europe’s third-busiest hub, had only one runway open for takeoffs on Tuesday afternoon, after being briefly forced to completely close due to the heavy snow.

An airport spokesman said 335 flights had been cancelled out of a scheduled daily total of 1,250.The Eurostar train between London and Paris, the Thalys line between Paris and Brussels and all other high-speed train lines in northern France were suspended until at least Wednesday.Nearly a third of France’s regions were on alert and the government activated a ministerial crisis group.Two northern French regions, Calvados and Manche, were under a “red alert” urging resident to stay indoors - the first time such an alert was activated because of snow.

Weather service Meteo France described the snowfall as “remarkable for the season” and warned that alerts would probably remain in place until at least Wednesday. More than 2,000 people were stranded in their cars overnight as heavy snow paralysed roads in Normandy and Brittany, with many spending the night in emergency shelters. About 80,000 homes in the north and northwest of France were without power, following snowfalls of up to 30 centimetres (12 inches) and winds creating metre-high snowdrifts. Schools in some northern regions were closed.

The snow caused major disruptions as it moved into Paris, with authorities urging the seven million commuters who use public transport every day to stay home. Several major roads around the capital were forced to close. The city’s two main airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly, said they had cancelled up to a quarter of flights and the nearby Beauvais airport, serving mainly low-cost airlines, cancelled all flights.At Orly, a Tunisair flight carrying 140 people from Djerba skidded off the runway on landing but no one was injured, an airport source said.

A traffic accident near Lille injured 14 people and a 58-year-old homeless man was found dead, presumably from the cold, outside a building in the town of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany.Hundreds were also stuck in their cars overnight in Britain, some for more than 10 hours as ice, snow and freezing winds descended on southeastern England.Police, rescue services, snow ploughs and gritting lorries battled to help the motorists in temperatures as low as -3 degrees Celsius (26 degrees Fahrenheit), with some areas under 10 centimetres (four inches) of snow.