This set is a great addition to any LEGO train collection. It has a few stickers which you need to put on, but it's a fun build. It also comes with two construction workers and a cool truck. The trailer can be removed, and the container can be removed as well. In the front of the truck you can see a grill and the headlights. The ceiling can be opened, and you can put the driver in the vehicle very easily. The big crane is also lot's of fun. The cockpit slides on the grey and black pieces, and you can lift the container off the truck or on the truck. The ceiling of the cockpit can be opened, and you can put in two minifigs if you want. It's a great set to have, and it's fun to play with, for sure.

All in all, this set is a great set and I would HIGHLY recommend you to get this. You can find this set on eBay and BrickLink for sure. Here is the link where you can check out the full gallery I made for this set on my website: www.klokriecher.de


Videos I made of this set:

Stopmotion 1

Stopmotion 2

Review

Speed Build

a perfect example of late 90s lego stuff - heavily simplified design and a strange colour-scheme. this set doesn't fit to older or newer train sets, it just goes with the 4565 train, so rather leave your hands off it and get the newer and better 4514 cargo crane.

This set is neat like the Freight and Crane Railway with the actually working scale. The neat thing is that this is accurate with the F&CRwy's scale. The truck is a nice addition as well with the container.

I love 9v Lego. The color schemes, the creative designs, the "unrealistic but not necessarily implausible" feel of all the trains, I think it's just great. I also grew up around the time (mid 90's) that they were starting to explode across the Lego scene and I had a trio of sets from the era back then. Now that I'm a big boy with disposable income I have a few others I didn't have back then, but of the three that I did have, this set, number 4557, was easily, hands-down the worst among them. Virtually every design decision in this thing is questionable and you really have to wonder exactly what Lego was going for with this thing. It feels like it's an expansion pack to sets that never got released. This set is unfinished out of the box and doesn't really go well with any other Lego 9v trains set from the same time period. There is a much later World City set, 4514, that does everything this set is trying to do a million times better than this one does it.

It's not *all* bad, though. Mostly bad, but not all. I do have to say, visually the set is pretty sharp looking, having a nice feel of a large, imposing industrial crane, the type you would see at a dock or a busy stockyard for a railroad. The color scheme of it is odd, but it actually matches up considerably well with the (also owned by me) train station from the same time period, set 4556. Basically everything else about this set is remarkably poorly thought out.

The Truck: This is the best part of the set. I really don't have much bad to say about this thing, it's a four-stud wide truck with an actually pretty clever design in the back for the carrying of cargo. If you're wondering if this truck is compatible with the "pods" from set 4559... Yes, it is, actually. The "Cargo Railway" set and this set go together as well as this set can go with anything. The pods, though six studs wide, fit remarkably well on the back of this truck. You do have to wonder why this truck isn't six studs wide, considering that its brother cargo truck from Cargo Railway is six studs wide, but alas, it isn't, though they are both compatible with each other. The little way that you can wrap the chain around the included cargo piece is pretty smart, I genuinely like that. Sadly there isn't really anywhere for the chain to go when the truck is not carrying cargo... The instructions show it as just resting on the two hooks behind the cab, but in all reality the chain is far too long and gets tangled up in the hinge bricks between the cab and trailer if you try that. Oh well.

The Cargo Piece: You'd better like this thing, because to my knowledge it's the one and only piece of cargo TLC ever released that's actually compatible with this silly crane. On the plus side, it's perfectly compatible with 4559. Completely so, fits in place of a pod wonderfully. On the downside, Lego never released a single other thing of these dimensions so it is the only thing that will do so unless you build one yourself. It's a small, no-frills affair, and to get your cargo out of the inside of the box you have the rather inelegant solution of just having to tear off one of the side walls. No doors for this thing, no hinge, just a few 1x4 bricks you have to manually remove and put back on. TLC was also kind enough to include a whopping one single container for it to haul. If you bought 4556, you'd have a second mail container to put in it. That's it. Nothing else. That container's contents? One single solitary 100 dollar bill brick. Only one. Couldn't have even included three or something, just one lone brick. Considering how big the cargo box is and how tiny the container is, you have to wonder why they couldn't have just included a little extra to fill the empty space. 4556 and 4559 came with tons of extraneous details and tiny bricks for added playability, this one you just get the bare minimum.

The Crane: And now's where the big problems begin. First thing's first, juniorisation's reared its ugly head once more, but it's the late nineties so that's to be expected. One can't help but feel the pair of huge A-brace supports should've been smaller pieces instead of one massive piece, but oh well.

Much unlike all the other juniorized sets of the era, the 9v train sets all have stickers and this one is no exceptions. Yes, one of them is a sticker over assembly, which are never good, have never been good, and will never be good. Town Jr. avoided stickers altogether, you have to wonder why the more expensive 9v Train sets didn't. Alas, there it is.

My biggest problem with this set is the baseplate. It's an elevated, flat baseplate with no ramp to help the truck included up onto it at all. And it's not like it's a common part, either, finding extra ramp plates to help your poor cargo truck up onto it is an extremely hard task nowadays, with bricklink being at your fingertips, let alone back in 1999. One has to assume TLC intended there to be some sort of expansion set to hook this thing up to to make it look even vaguely complete and not like it's a part of a larger assembly but... there is no such set. This thing has a two-brick tall gap between it and any baseplate you may put it on, unless you want to shell out for a pair of ramp bricks, which were not commonly available nor in any sets one would call "cheap", neither then nor now.

Ah, I hear you say, but what about 4556? That has similar baseplates! And it does. Problems being twofold: One, it only has one ramp, so at best you can connect this to the right side of the station and still need a second ramp. Two, this thing does not fit with the station next to it at ALL. The staircase that extends out onto the flat road base on that set blocks the cargo truck from fitting through to this crane completely. This is particularly odd when you consider both these sets were sold at the same time and probably sold to the same people, 9v Train collectors, but there appeared to have been zero thought put into making them compatible with each other outside of the color scheme. You have to totally re-design 4556 to enable the truck to fit past it to the crane, and even then, there's still a two-brick tall gap between the floor and the base of the crane.

What else is wrong with it? Well, it's horribly balanced, for one. The sliding track pieces on top aren't held in place or re-enforced very well and it tends to tip over to one side if you put the crane on one side or another with anything of any weight on it, which you will have to, because one of the other biggest kickers incoming:

The "pods" from 4559 (again, the closest thing TLC ever released to anything compatible with this thing out of the box) don't fit underneath the crane, at all! So while you *can* pick them up, you can't actually move them, the A-support pillars are simply too close together at the top. Considering these pods are the ONLY thing released anywhere near when this set came out that the crane would be capable of picking up, this renders this sad set even more pointless.

The cab of the crane is actually one of the better parts of the set, with the "weight" thing being nonfunctional at best and a weird joke at worst. While it would be cool if it worked like a scale, it doesn't, as it just completes a total 360 degree spin when you raise or lower the cargo, leading to the odd scenario where the scale's needle is pointing straight down off the scale with the load raised up all the way.

The large crank handle on the side of the piece, while it looks pretty bad, is totally understandable. Lego sets are, after all, designed primarily to be interfaced with by humans, who are much larger than the sets, so I'll let the big ugly crank slide.

The cab's roof however, I will not. It's held in place by a whopping two studs that aren't very close to each other, so the thing breaks off if you so much as blow on it. I dig the two steering wheels inside the cab though, that's kinda neat, as you'd expect the operator of a gantry crane to need to turn around pretty frequently so having controls on either side makes sense.

My other complaint before I finally move on from whining about the bad design of a set made nearly two decades ago that didn't really sell all that well is about the base. Like most of the set, there's just about the bare minimum of details on it. You get a fence with two signs on it (which is an appreciated touch... shame we couldn't have had a few more things like this) and a tree. Growing out of concrete. Right in front of a staircase, meant to be walked up. They realized they needed *something* extraneous on the set and just grabbed the first decorative brick they could find and plopped it down right there. Super weird design choice, that.

Building Experience: Probably the best part about this set. It's a fine build. The way it all is put together is creative, if not particularly well done. You could easily see how you could re-design this thing to make it an actual functional gantry crane (support beams an equal distance apart their entire length being a good start). No real complaints here. Again, the truck is quite nice at least, and the chain system to keep the cargo in place really does work real well.

Parts: I mean it's not bad, a lot of the parts are nice technical hard to find pieces, the extra raised base plate is a huge knock against it but you can use for something else easily enough. The hinge chassis of the truck is a nice piece, the A-frame bricks you can undoubtedly work into something better (oh wait they have stickers on them, never mind), and an extra tree is always nice to have. Nothing super rare nor super interesting sadly.

Playability: Incredibly poor. The lack of anything compatible with it, the fact that it seems to have been designed in a vacuum with no regard for the other Train sets available at the time it came out, the lack of any way to get a car under the gantry without just lifting them, and the weird balance issues with the crane mean this thing is seriously bad in this department. Which is a shame, as it could have been so much better with some more effort added. There are so few extraneous details it's weird considering how 4556 and 4559 and especially 4561 were just jam-packed with little neat features. Oh well, they can't all be gems.

Value for the Money: Well, it's 50 bucks if you can find it and that's the cheapest I've ever seen it these days, so pretty remarkably bad in this category. For a set without any real point and that isn't even totally finished or usable right out of the box... It isn't worth that much. If you're a collector and absolutely must have all the 9v Lego train sets... This is in fact a 9v Lego train set, so you probably want it, but if that's you you also probably aren't reading a review of it either. I do understand the urge to finish a collection (believe me), but trust me when I say this is a pretty underwhelming set for how much it costs. Skip it.