Snowstorms caused hundreds of train cancellations in Britain and flight disruptions in Germany, Sweden and Portugal, as well as bringing road chaos to Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic.
Worst hit was northeastern France, where 5,000 to 10,000 people spent a chilly night behind the wheel after traffic ground to a halt on a stretch of motorway between the towns of Toul and Nancy.
A homeless man in his 40s was found dead in a car in the southeastern city of Lyon, thought to have died of cold. An emergency phone number for homeless people received 1,300 calls Tuesday, many more than usual.
In the northwestern Manche department, 300 to 400 people were taken into shelters for the night, after deep snow caused a string of truck accidents that blocked access for snow-clearance workers.
All high-speed train services between Paris, Lyon, Marseille and
Montpellier were suffering delays of one to two hours after drivers were ordered to cut their speed for safety reasons -- but there were no cancellations.
Below-freezing conditions have gripped northern Europe for several days, with night-time temperatures falling as low as minus 15 Celsius in places.
Snowfall in the eastern half of England forced hundreds of trains to be cancelled, spelling hassle for Britons travelling into work on the first day after the Christmas break.
Sports fixtures were disrupted with several football matches and horse races called off, and forecasters predicted up to 25 centimetres of snow could fall in eastern Scotland and northeast England overnight.
In Germany, flights were delayed by up to 30 minutes out of Frankfurt and Stuttgart airports, as the country lay blanketed almost entirely in white, with more heavy snowfall expected in the coming days.
Villages cut off
In Sweden, though accustomed to seasonal temperatures well below freezing, Sturup airport in the southern city of Malmo was closed for several hours due to snow on the runways, forcing flights to be diverted to Copenhagen.
More blizzards and strong winds were expected overnight in both Sweden and Denmark.
In the Czech Republic, the highway linking Prague to the country's second city Brno was closed for several hours on Wednesday morning after a collision involving four lorries in thick snow.
The road link from Brno to the Austrian capital Vienna was also shut down after a Polish truck carrying four tonnes of wood crashed into an embankment in snowy weather.
In northern Italy, heavy snowfall also caused the closure of highway links to southeastern France.
In Turkey, where the cold has claimed four lives this week, temperatures plummeted overnight to minus 31 degrees Celsius in the eastern mountain area of Agri.
More than 1,000 villages remained cut off by deep snow that blocked access to some 3,300 hamlets earlier this week.
Further west, bad weather and strong winds disrupted air traffic on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Two flights of the Portuguese airline TAP, one from Paris and the other Frankfurt, had to be diverted to the island of Porto Santo.