ACCOUNTS manager Tom Blackmore said he was almost falling asleep at his desk yesterday after he and his young family endured two nights of raucous noise from engineering work on the nearby rail line.

He and wife Rosie, have been living at their home in Westbury Park, Royal Wootton Bassett, for the past three years and have grown accustomed to the background noise of the railway. They were expecting the extra disturbance the work to upgrade electrify the line would bring.

But nothing had prepared them for the sound of chainsaws, angle grinders and shouting at 2am in the morning for two nights in a row.

“I don’t know how anybody could expect to sleep through that,” he said.

“When you get no sleep at night it absolutely knocks you out.

“The first night it woke me up I could hear it going on at about 1.30am. I put up with it for so long and then shut the windows.

“It was so loud I recorded it and called them in the morning.”

The noise woke their toddler son Lincoln, who normally sleeps through the sound of work on the tracks.

Rosie said: “I think it’s absolutely disgusting. If we went outside and started chainsawing at 2am we would be arrested.

“There are lots of children around here who have school, we have got work. I just think they have no consideration for any of us that live round here.”

She added: “My little boy is a brilliant sleeper. For him to wake up, it just made me really cross. We are all just tired.”

Their neighbour Dawn Hicks was also woken up by the racket during the early hours.

“Because we are so close to the line we have always noticed that the work tends to be started on the weekend,” she said, and was rarely two nights in a row.

“But Monday and last night we heard what sounded like chainsaws from about midnight to 3am.”

She was awake for around five hours and struggled to get back to sleep once the work ended. Her husband and disabled son also suffered from disturbed sleep.

Looking out over the track the following morning she saw felled trees and a wood chipper left by the line.

“It’s obvious they are doing it for railway safety but if they have left the equipment there I don’t know why they can’t do it in the daytime,” she said.

A spokesman for Network Rail said: “We always try to carry out noisy work during the day, but due to the nature of the railway this is not always possible.

“We would like to apologise to residents of Westbury Park for the disruption they have experienced during this work. We take the welfare of our lineside neighbours very seriously and will work to minimise noise levels in the future.”

The work is part of a major £3bn scheme to electrify the Great Western railway network. The huge project was due to be completed by 2018 but four sections of the scheme have been deferred following a government announcement earlier this month.

Completion of the lines between Bath Spa to Bristol Temple Meads, Bristol Parkway to Temple Meads, Oxford to Didcot Parkway and the Thames Valley branches to Henley and Windsor have been put back to between 2019 and 2024.