Literally never seen this set before.
It’s actually pretty lame and a boring build!
The trees are the best part of the set.

Why do those trees look so off?

@lemish34 said:
"It’s actually pretty lame and a boring build!
The trees are the best part of the set."

And yet, sadly, these are not the really good granulated trees that came along two years later.

@PurpleDave said:
" @WhileyFox said:
"Why do those trees look so off? "

Huh. Not the famous crumble trees. Um, a lot of stuff from the early years looks like it was meant to be used as scenery on a hobby train layout. This includes die-cast cars, and probably these weird trees as well. One early form of tree was the crumble tree, where they molded a brown trunk, coated it in solvent, and then dipped it in green ABS pellets to represent the leaves (which, true to their design, would shed periodically). Then there were a couple different generations of these flat molded trees before they eventually stopped trying to court the hobby train crowd so heavily, created the minifig, and just produced the full range of stuff you’d need to make a train layout."

I didn't know about that at all. But that makes sense since I don't own any sets older than 1978. I wonder what the cost was to do all this? They really are distracting to the eye. They give me that same feeling that the Toy Story minifigs did, where the heads didn't feel like LEGO at all.

The lighting is so dramatic

@WizardOfOss said:
" @sjr60 said:
" @BLProductions said:
"Warehouse? I was at work in a warehouse just a few hours ago, and it looked nothing like this. Why is this one on stilts?"
To make it level with a train.
"
Also to create ventilation underneath, and by doing so to keep everything in the building dry and (somewhat) cool, and keep it safe from pests.
(though that was more likely in the era long before trains existed)"

There are other ways of creating ventilation in the foundation, but forklifts can be astonishingly heavy (like as heavy as a Hummer H1, but with the footprint of a Ford Focus), so you want a good solid concrete foundation for them to drive on. And that’s just for an empty warehouse. Then if you’ve got multilevel pallet racking, you need to anchor the legs to the floor, and need to consider the total weight of a fully loaded warehouse. It adds up quicker than you think. You might be able to put a cross dock on stilts, but not a proper warehouse. A cross dock would just be designed for freight to be transferred directly from train cars to semi trailers and vice versa. It would theoretically only need enough room to sort through the load if it needs to be reloaded in a specific order based on weight, and it wouldn’t really need vertical storage racks because each load should be fully reloaded before they start working on the next one.

@PurpleDave said:
" @WizardOfOss said:
" @sjr60 said:
" @BLProductions said:
"Warehouse? I was at work in a warehouse just a few hours ago, and it looked nothing like this. Why is this one on stilts?"
To make it level with a train.
"
Also to create ventilation underneath, and by doing so to keep everything in the building dry and (somewhat) cool, and keep it safe from pests.
(though that was more likely in the era long before trains existed)"

There are other ways of creating ventilation in the foundation, but forklifts can be astonishingly heavy (like as heavy as a Hummer H1, but with the footprint of a Ford Focus), so you want a good solid concrete foundation for them to drive on. And that’s just for an empty warehouse. Then if you’ve got multilevel pallet racking, you need to anchor the legs to the floor, and need to consider the total weight of a fully loaded warehouse. It adds up quicker than you think. You might be able to put a cross dock on stilts, but not a proper warehouse. A cross dock would just be designed for freight to be transferred directly from train cars to semi trailers and vice versa. It would theoretically only need enough room to sort through the load if it needs to be reloaded in a specific order based on weight, and it wouldn’t really need vertical storage racks because each load should be fully reloaded before they start working on the next one."

In the era trains didn't exist yet, neither dit forklifts, Hummer or pallets....simpler times....

@AustinPowers said:
" @sjr60 said:
" @BLProductions said:
"Warehouse? I was at work in a warehouse just a few hours ago, and it looked nothing like this. Why is this one on stilts?"
To make it level with a train."
Exactly. What many don't seem to remember (or know in the first place) is that a lot of early LEGO was designed to fit into a train layout, specifically H0/00.

And back then there were loads of these small warehouses along minor train lines all over Europe. They often looked something like this:

https://www.ebay.de/itm/357750650776

Sometimes they also looked like they were built on stilts in real life, but in this case it might also have been LEGO trying to save on using too many bricks.

Simpler times. "

My grandfather has a large model train layout in his basement and it has similar looking buildings. One of them has the appearance of a warehouse and it's raised off of the ground like you're describing. When I asked him about it (because I had no idea) he informed me it was modeled after a specific building that used to actually exist in our state. This particular building was apparently an ice house, where trains could resupply on fresh ice to keep things cold while being transported.

Not sure why, but this looks like a liminal space to me.