Design-wise, I think Lego really hit it perfectly with this set.  It is very simple, yet the Bauhaus style windows and the asymmetry of the rolling gantry give it clean lines, realism, and an architectural style that I wish Lego would repeat.  It is true that the gantry requires a light touch, and with the evolution toward 6-wide containers, the gantry's 4-wide grabber is of limited utility.  But when paired with container trains like 4563, this set has deep playability.  Along with 10027, this is one of the classics of Lego train structures. 

now this is a really great set, and the biggest and best of all the freight stations (not even the one from 4565 gets close). its hige fun building and playing with it, you have these nice big windows and an additional waggon. the bad thing are the stickers on the yellow bridge, once put on you'll have to leave the whole thing as it is... but apart from that - one of the best train sets ever!

The yellow crane derails quite often. Apart from that, the whole thing is built on a street plate and on a smaller, ordinary baseplate. The two plates aren't sufficiently connected with bricks. So when you want to put the cargo station somewhere else in your LEGO town, you must transport three pieces: the yellow crane, the baseplate with the main building and the road plate with the rails on it. You cannot transport it with your hands as one piece from one place to another. It'll definitely fall apart.

The container truck looks great. The same is true for the waggon. If you want to have some more waggons - maybe you want waggons that look the same as the one in the set - that is no problem. You can easily build the same waggon by purchasing the necessary bricks. Of course, the blue train baseplate of the waggon is very rare, but I am intending to build more waggons of that kind by using black train plates. So my cargo station will be busier. It's also easy to build additional containers.

Set 4549 (Container Double Stack) might be a good addition to this cargo station. If you have it as well, you can transport your containers from this cargo station to another area of your town, where the mobile container crane from set 4549 can unload and reload the waggons.

First of all: THIS SET WAS RELEASED IN 1995! not 1996! I bought this set a couple of years ago, it costed about 680 NOK I think (about 95 $). It were very expensive, and I was very disappointed when I discovered the rails without slots. The picture outside the box, the instruction and all of the other ones showed slotted rails. The crane is weak and derails often. But the design is great, the wagon is cool and the truck is good. The building could be improoved with stairs.

I wish Lego made a set with only the container wagon and two containers.