TWO sisters who live either side of a railway line will be cut off from each other when Network Rail starts rebuilding their village’s only bridge.

Work to dismantle the bridge in Sands Road, South Moreton, near Didcot, started earlier this month and will take until April next year to complete.

Network Rail is installing a higher replacement as part of a £71m line upgrade to allow modern shipping containers to travel between Southampton and Nuneaton.

The road from South Moreton to North Moreton, between Didcot and Wallingford, will completely shut to traffic from December 14 to April 12 and a lengthy diversion set up.

Work to lift in the new bridge – which Network Rail warns will be “very noisy” – must be completed during the 72 hours of track closure at Christmas to avoid commuter chaos. It means that as families sit down to Christmas lunch, 50 workmen and an 800-tonne crane will be lifting the new concrete bridge over the tracks, while sisters Win Clark, 85, and Marjorie Hall, 87, face being cut off from one another during the road closure.

The lifelong villagers, who have seven grandchildren and two great-granchildren between them, live either side of the railway tracks, and will soon face a lengthy diversion to get to each others’ houses.

Mrs Clark, of Sands Road, said: “I can’t hang the washing out because it gets filthy with dirt.

“The windows are filthy, and I’ve had to hose the car down.

“At the moment I put up with it, but I don’t know what it’s going to be like when they lift the bridge in.”

David Hughes, 44, who runs a birds of prey business close to the bridge, said his sparrowhawk and goshawks had become agitated and stressed by the disturbance over the last couple of weeks.

He said: “Some of the birds could be dead as a result of this. You can see them tense up.

“It’s worrying me all the time at the moment.”

He said he was considering moving out while the work was going on over Christmas, adding: “I’ll probably end up sitting in a caravan on my own with just the birds.”

At peak times, 26 trains an hour carry 4,500 people beneath the bridge, making it impossible to close the line for anything but the briefest period.

Scheme project manager Rob Newton said: “It’s going to be noisy – there’s no point in hiding that fact.

“but there are only certain times of year we can schedule a 72-hour closure of a four-track railway.”