SLUMBERING residents were awoken from peaceful sleep in Nether Alderley as bypass contractors started a noisy early morning shift last week.

Contractors began digging out the earth beneath the railway line at Welsh Row ready for the £52 million bypass to go through.

And the deafening thud led to an alarming wake-up call at nearby houses and complaints afterwards about the disturbance.

A spokesman for Brise Rail said contractors were working flat out to pile in the heavy metal sheets which will shore up the ground so that the underbridge can be put in place on time.

Site manager Steve Evans warned there would be a repeat on Boxing Day, Friday, December 26, when work is due to start at 8am and continue through the night in bursts until 6am Saturday morning.

He said: "Drilling is in progress to vibrate the piles (iron sheeting) and it has to be hammered in place afterwards. We regret the inconvenience to residents and apologise for the noise but the work must be done.  We have tried to minimise the impact as much as possible."

The work is part of the phase two preliminary contract for the new railway bridge which is taking place while the line is closed and electricity turned off over Christmas.

Rail closure is planned from Christmas Eve until the early hours of Monday, December 29. Night time work took place last weekend and will again this Friday, December 19, from 6.30pm Friday to 7.30am Sunday.

Cheshire County Council chairman Steve Wilkinson said: "The work to create this long-awaited bypass has now begun in earnest.  Phase two is an important preliminary phase of the works. Phase three begins in January when the county council will be overseeing the building of the bypass, road works, the building of three other bridges and drainage".

The bypass will be completed by spring 2011 - a contract period of 117 weeks.

Work on the three-and-a-half mile route which has been in the pipeline for more than 70 years, began at the end of the summer.

The first phase was overseen by the county council during the autumn, and involved diverting a sewer and erecting fences.

Phase two mainly involves Network Rail, which says it has deliberately chosen to do the works over Christmas to cause the least disruption to rail passengers.

Special machinery will drive 20 metre-long steel sheets underground while electrification is down and the rail track will be lifted and a culvert installed.

Tony Wilcock, Network Rail’s territory civil engineer, said: "The work in December and over the Christmas period is essential to ensure the stability of the underpass where it crosses the railway line. Having done that, the installation of the bridge section that will carry the railway line over the road will take place over Christmas 2009.  We carry out this type of work over holiday periods because this is when it causes least disruption to people using the railway. Trains don’t run on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and few people use the railway between then and the New Year."

Councillor Marc Asquith said: "This is all part of the process of building an underpass. They can only do this when the line is closed and hammering it in is a noisy affair which can only take place in the middle of the night. It has hit the residents very hard.  But the residents of Alderley and Great Warford wanted the road to go underneath the line not over it which would have been much easier."