Nearly 2,000 train commuters were left stranded overnight on the French-Spanish border region after heavy snowfall left over 3.3ft of snow on the Pyrenees mountains.
About 1,800 commuters were trapped in trains in the Aude region of southern France, with over 100 marooned on a sleeper train in the Pyrénées-Orientales linking Spain's Barcelona to Montpellier on Tuesday 9 March.
With services only resuming the next morning, firefighters and local authority workers arranged food and drinks for the stuck passengers and maintained overnight heating using diesel following power cuts.
People spent the night sleeping aboard trains and in hotels, gyms and town halls near the border with Spain.
The snowfall, Barcelona's heaviest since 1962, also extended to Italy, affecting the tourist areas of Pisa, Siena and Assisi and disrupting traffic in Viterbo, north of Rome.
