It’s your letters

Stand safety

The 2017 edition of Model Rail’s How to Build a Model Railway featured ‘A crash course in soldering’ (page 44). One thing that most such articles don’t tell you is that the spring on the soldering iron stand can get very hot in use, and can give you a nasty burn if you happen to brush against it. Having experienced it myself, I decided to prevent this by fitting a shroud around the spring made from a bit of aluminium sheet. This allows the stand to be used in the normal way, but it only gets warm rather than hot. Mike Dean, Andover

Ease of access

After years of trying to keep the awkward to reach portions of track clean on my 10ft oval circuit layout, I have found the best and easiest way for larger layouts is using an old truck and taking out one set of wheels, carving up an abrasive track cleaning block and squeezing it under the frame. It stays on the track with only one set of wheels and follows behind a towing engine easily. Even as it wears it is in contact with the tracks. I hadn’t seen this done before in any magazines but it offers a cheap solution to a problem we all have. John Wills, by e-mail

Praise for Peco

I recently opened a Wills kit, only to find that the wrong type of window had been included. Not being sure of how to resolve the problem, I called Peco for help. An extremely helpful lady, Ms Knight, immediately took action to get a replacement part ordered and posted to me. I would like to thank Peco for the level of customer care that they gave me for such a minor problem. Well done! Richard Wheeler, Southampton