Things I like about this set:
- bay window
- baseplate
- forklift with spring
- someone took the time to plant flowers (although being yellow, they could be considered dandelions which as a weed in an otherwise pristine, green landscape could represent the designer’s horrific foreshadowing of the disease blighting the hallowed history that would become LEGO’s near future. But I am sure I am reading too much into it)
- great tools and accessories.

So between a good number of the RPotD's uses, the set that the RMotD came in, and the RSotD, this has been a high-flying day!

Getting the strongest sense of deja vu from this set, like another version of it has popped up on RSotD before but this seems to be the only variant. There been some cunningly disguised copy of it?

Is this beginning toward, almost, the end for Lego few years later? This lights prints and similar 'spill over' to other Town sets, like they all become Juniorised

Homage to 6391

Apart from the obvious juniorization of vehicles I very much like the simple yet effective buildings, the vibrant color schemes and of course the coolest minifig faces with sunglasses ever made.

@Brickalili said:
"Getting the strongest sense of deja vu from this set, like another version of it has popped up on RSotD before but this seems to be the only variant. There been some cunningly disguised copy of it?"

I think the minifigure with the green tie was a Random Minifigure of the Day.

If the mini-figs become tired of searching for your lost post, the buildings and colors seem to double as your usual police station replica.

The ghosts are at it again, and they've resorted to grand theft auto!

@WemWem said:
"Oh dear, it’s Town Junior again…

Everyone just avert your eyes and pretend you didn’t see it, Huwbot will be back tomorrow with something more palatable, hopefully…"
Or Jack Stone, or possibly Galidor. Znap's also a possibility...

@TheOtherMike said:
" @WemWem said:
"Oh dear, it’s Town Junior again…

Everyone just avert your eyes and pretend you didn’t see it, Huwbot will be back tomorrow with something more palatable, hopefully…"
Or Jack Stone, or possibly Galidor. Znap's also a possibility..."

I’m tempting fate, I know. I was bedridden for several days after the last Clickits post…

Speaking in USD, this set feels like a rare case where it's still worth the same amount as it was back then with inflation. Yeah... almost $100 in todays money for 228 pieces. It is a town Jr set, so the large pieces make sense for it, but for comparison the newest fire station 60414 is $20 less and has around 3x more parts over this set

See, this is Town Junior, unlike that recent Rail Service Truck

@MrGurt said:
"Speaking in USD, this set feels like a rare case where it's still worth the same amount as it was back then with inflation. Yeah... almost $100 in todays money for 228 pieces. It is a town Jr set, so the large pieces make sense for it, but for comparison the newest fire station 60414 is $20 less and has around 3x more parts over this set"

This new fire station actually is really cool, very different from the standard.
I'm sure people will still call this 2024 set Junior as it uses 2x2 slopes and bricks , and some smaller 1x2 pillars, but I think this is still a different build from just stacking regular tall pillars and panels all over the build, and the front area between the garages has a lot of space for expansion for a locker/recreation room or something.

This will forever remind me of 6325 Package Pick-Up because of the shared minifigure.
Why that set? Because I had THREE of those! Apparently it was a popular gift that year!

In fairness, It's nice that the handcart and box can fit on the back of and in the car. And it came with a printed computer tile and monitor brick.

Looking back, these were a bit like 4Juniors in that although the sets shouldn't be all lego has to offer, they still come with nice parts at least.

This really was the beginning of the 'almost end'. In the past week or so have been reorganizing my LEGO catalogues, and it is truly baffling to dream trough the 1979, 1989 or 1995 catalogues - to name but a few I absolutely LOVED back then and still do - and then open those of 1999 to, say, 2005.

It is really hard to believe that you are looking at the same company. Not that everything was bad. But the bad things were truly incredibly bad.

@Binnekamp said:
"In fairness, It's nice that the handcart and box can fit on the back of and in the car. And it came with a printed computer tile and monitor brick."

As I look out on our crappy winter-actually-happened weather, I do like to be reminded how nice it is to get computery shipments delivered in delivery vehicles that have no roof.

Was this the last cargo based centre set we got from Lego?

26 years ago was a long time ago, and it seems like Cargo could still be a relevant City service today, what with online shopping and more parcels floating around the world than ever before (I’m guessing).

@Rimefang said:
" @Brickalili said:
"Getting the strongest sense of deja vu from this set, like another version of it has popped up on RSotD before but this seems to be the only variant. There been some cunningly disguised copy of it?"

I think the minifigure with the green tie was a Random Minifigure of the Day."

Hmm, maybe. Since I can’t be bothered trailing through all the RSotD entries looking, we’ll go with it!

@chrisaw said:
"Was this the last cargo based centre set we got from Lego?

26 years ago was a long time ago, and it seems like Cargo could still be a relevant City service today, what with online shopping and more parcels floating around the world than ever before (I’m guessing). "

60169 is a recent example, though bigger on the vehicles and smaller on the buildings.

@TheRichrocker said:
"It is really hard to believe that you are looking at the same company. Not that everything was bad. But the bad things were truly incredibly bad."

To be fair, I've read that they actually did restructure in the late 90s.
So you might be right on the money that it wasn't exactly like it used to be within the company either.

Many of the old guard had left or had been replaced by newer and younger designers. Specifically those in a design background, less so those in a toy design background. That's half of why we got so many juniorised parts back then: the designers basically invented new parts all the time as they didn't want to just stick to the existing ways how things were done.
The other half is that lego's higher-ups saw the competition increase by video games and other digital toys, and thus took from this that 'today's' kids had no patience for the actual building process and just wanted instant play. Hence what now is called Town Jr. by AFOLs (in reality they just changed the way Town was done in general to aim at a younger age range, with the exception of some standalone related themes like Divers, Outback, Res-Q, X-Treme Team, Studios and the like).
In fact, in 2001 and 2002 Lego didn't really have a dedicated Town-like theme or a regulars Technic theme outside of re-releases and one-offs. Apparently Jack Stone and Bionicle, Racers and Spybotics were meant to fill those roles?

It'd be like if Lego decided to cancel City and make all City-like sets 4 Juniors.

This is basically what led to lego throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. Bringing in licensed themes, Mindstorms and Constraction (and especially Bionicle) were success. Considering how it survived the mostly rock-bottom year of 2003 by 4 more years, I'd say Belville was a modest one too (although it probably cost a lot behind the scenes).

Stuff like the in-house video game departments (yes, plural), Scala, Xplore (a rebranding of Duplo), Jack Stone, and infamously Galidor were not. Oh, and Licensed themes when there was no movie coming out for said theme too. At the time, anyway.

Most infamously, lego once launched a fiber optics system that was actually losing them money with each 8456 set sold, as the cost to produce it was far too high. It's in sets 9732, 8456, 6979 and 8480. Each not a terrible set even if it hadn't been included.

@chrisaw said:
"26 years ago was a long time ago, and it seems like Cargo could still be a relevant City service today, what with online shopping and more parcels floating around the world than ever before (I’m guessing)."

2020 of course got hammered. Everyone shopping for everything online to avoid having to go anywhere, plus people who would normally spend money on travel/entertainment buying merchandise to alleviate the boredom. In the US, it got so bad that Fed-Ex and UPS started capping how much they’d accept outbound from non-essential businesses, so all the overload landed on the USPS (who aren’t legally allowed to do the same). Trucks were lined up in front of postal sorting centers for 3-4 days before they could finally get a dock assignment to be unloaded. The big port in California got so backed up with container ships that couldn’t unload anywhere else (I think some were anchored offshore for 2+ weeks before getting their dock assignment) that many retail businesses got the bright idea of having the containers packed solid with unpalletized boxes so they could get more freight in each container, and just have it palletized once it arrived stateside.

None of these businesses stopped to think about how many pallets the US “imports” with freight that’s being shipped from overseas. All those containers ended up stalled in the system due to a nationwide pallet shortage. I started seeing pallets that looked like they were made out of fence posts and garden trellises, a few months after home improvement centers were reported to have jacked the cost of lumber through the roof. About the only mistake that wasn’t made that year was having freight shipped without the boxes to save just a tiny bit _more_ room per container (there was also a nationwide cardboard shortage, due to the surge in parcel shipments).

@Binnekamp:
So a restructuring in the mid-90’s followed by another one in the mid-00’s to undo all the things they screwed up the previous time?

Technic in the early-aughts got weird. Bionicle started out Technic-branded, sure. But they also started making Technic Star Wars sets. I think that dual-classification is more to blame for dumping the Technic (and Duplo) brands, but the drawback was that sets that weren’t anything but regular Technic had nowhere to land, and basically went out of production with nothing to replace them. Subthemes like Bionicle, or dual-themed lines like Technic Star Wars still had a name that could be attached, so they were fine.

And if that fiber-optic system was losing them money, how did the Spybotics version fare?

@Rob42
@TeriXeri

As someone who left disparaging remarks on both sets, and whose opinions were formed by living through the era, I stand by my remarks. Juniorization was on a spectrum. The truck (which I own) had clear evidence of it (see my post on that set), as did the rest of the train sets that year—enough for young me to be quite unimpressed at the time, because I could compare it to sets I'd gotten 10, even 3, years earlier. This RSOTD has even more evidence. Almost the entire product line of the era was blighted to some degree. That was a purposeful decision on Lego's part. The company had concluded that modern children no longer had the attention spans or desire to engage with intricate construction toys, and they attempted to dumb-down the product to meet the customer where it (allegedly) was. Lego only recovered when they realized their customer craved the complex experience they'd taken away.

I wasn't expecting it's a junior set, it does kinda look simple tho.

@MeisterDad said:
"Things I like about this set:
- bay window
- baseplate
- forklift with spring
- someone took the time to plant flowers (although being yellow, they could be considered dandelions which as a weed in an otherwise pristine, green landscape could represent the designer’s horrific foreshadowing of the disease blighting the hallowed history that would become LEGO’s near future. But I am sure I am reading too much into it)
- great tools and accessories."

I think the Bay window piece is one of the very few things that were good that came out of that era.

One of the first sets I got when I came out of my dark ages. For all its flaws, I have a certain affection for it on that basis alone.

@AllenSmith:
Of course the huge irony here is that, in the middle of all that juniorization…they launched the Star Wars UCS sub-theme. Nobody can make a compelling argument that _those_ were juniorized versions of existing themes.

@AllenSmith said:
" @Rob42
@TeriXeri

As someone who left disparaging remarks on both sets, and whose opinions were formed by living through the era, I stand by my remarks. Juniorization was on a spectrum. The truck (which I own) had clear evidence of it (see my post on that set), as did the rest of the train sets that year—enough for young me to be quite unimpressed at the time, because I could compare it to sets I'd gotten 10, even 3, years earlier. This RSOTD has even more evidence. Almost the entire product line of the era was blighted to some degree. That was a purposeful decision on Lego's part. The company had concluded that modern children no longer had the attention spans or desire to engage with intricate construction toys, and they attempted to dumb-down the product to meet the customer where it (allegedly) was. Lego only recovered when they realized their customer craved the complex experience they'd taken away."

My thoughts exactly. It was the idea that Legos were for kids only and that no AFOL's existed.

Star Wars proved everyone wrong.