4525 & 4546 Road N' Rail Maintenance and Repair (Dual review)

[JopieK]

First set:

Name: Road N' Rail Maintenance

Set No.: 4546

Theme: LEGO System / Trains / 9V Train Cars

Year: 1991

Pieces: 74

Minifigs: 1

Price: USD 10$ (which equals about EUR 6,8€ and GBP 5.50£)

Second set:

Name: Road N' Rail Repair

Set No.: 4525

Theme: LEGO System / Trains / 9V Train Cars

Year: 1994

Pieces: 81

Minifigs: 1

Price: USD 10$ (which equals about EUR 6,8€ and GBP 5.50£)

A lot of people almost had tears in their eyes at the end of a great era: the year of 1991 when LEGO went from the gray 12V train system to the wheel powered 9V system. A lot of nice additions like the remote controlled switches and points, were never introduced to the 9V system. However the 9V system also brought a lot of advantages. The rails were more durable and much easier and quicker to lay. That is why quite some people went away from the 12V system towards the 9V system.

Some LEGO conglomerations still stayed faithful to the old 12V system. To make it easier for the 12V towns to accept the change to the new 9V system, LEGO released the Road N' Rail Maintenance truck. The truck is used to keep the tracks clean and detect any track irregularities and point malfunctions. Unfortunately, LEGO did not immediately release the Road N' Rail Repair digger with the truck. That might have triggered quite some LEGO cities to replace the 12V rails by the new 9V system much sooner. But well, when the rail and road digger was finally released, a lot of LEGO railroad officials decided to put it to good use, both for the older 12V tracks and newer 9V railroads.

These sets nicely fit together! With the first one, the railroad workers can scout the tracks. The digger might actually also use the truck to transport dirt etc. Maybe the faster truck can also let some railroad workers sit in the back of the pickup and help the digger operator to reach his vehicle soon.

An overview of the two Maintenance vehicles and the 12V people (most of them already with their brand new Northern Rail uniforms that will actually mark the entrance of the 9V era) that stare at them with quite some caution, but also some curiosity.

Well, let's first have a look at the Road N' Rail Maintenance truck. The model looks a little bit like a Mercedes Unimog that is actually a realistic representation of the real world situation.

The railroad worker has the new Northern uniform with white/red stripes. Back in 1991 Northern Rail safety regulations must not have been very strict, since the worker did not need to wear a safety helmet at all. It seems to be that our warrior of the railroad has had a rough day, but he still looks very LEGO friendly.

The Maintenance truck seems to have some very peculiar accessories. First of all we would ask ourselves the question whether it shouldn't have been names Road N' Rail Garbage Truck. I have never noticed a restroom on our LEGO trains and so, what would our skilled railroad worker need to do with a trash bin?! The broom and shovel are very useful to keep the tracks both clear and clean. The digger doesn't have any accessories, but for one or both sets some additional tools like a blade saw would have been appropriate.

Now the truck itself. As said, it has the appearance of an Unimog. An antenna on the roof makes communication with rail traffic control possible to make sure that no trains will be guided to the same block that the rail vehicle operates in. A yellow flashing light on top of the roof even improves visibility of the truck while being on the tracks.

The truck has the (for 1991) new Nothern Rail logo on the doors (a transparant sticker with black logo). Strangely enough the truck just has frontlight and no backlights.

The retractable wheels of the truck are demonstrated in this picture.

As you can see there is a little traction problem. So hopefully the truck is driven directly by the track-wheels and not directly by the road wheels on the tracks.

For both vehicles, mounting the tracks is really a piece of cake.

As you can see, LEGO has used nice wheels with springs for the rail truck (road) wheels.

Well back to work! A good moment to take a look at my little brother (or sister?!), the rail digger.

The rail digger is actually officially called "Road N' Rail Repair". It resembles the Road N' Rail Maintenance quite much, at least for the bottom part.

By 1994 new orders were issues to the Northern Rail railroad workers to wear safety hats. In this case a nice white one. Maybe a yellow helmet would even had been better, but the helmet is already quite an improvement compared to the driver of the rail truck.

SNOT is not used very often in City sets, and yet this is exactly what gives the Road N' Rail Maintenance digger just that nice additional touch.

Here you can see the digger on the tracks. Apparently the distance between the tracks and the wheels is a little bit better for this set although it should not matter since the car bases are identical. To improve stability when digging or other operations, the digger can lower their outriggers in a very neat so that they perfectly keep the digger on the tracks.

As you can see, the digger has a very nice reach. This helps improving and building the track (digging ditches next to the tracks, helping to place points, etc.) The digger has two handles: one for turning the body, the other for operating the arm. The operator is using his feet to speed up or slow down the truck and raise or lower wheels and outriggers. For safety, the direction of the rotating body will determine the direction that the wheels turn.

Also an nice feature, is the use of the retracted outriggers to fix the 360 degrees turnable body of the digger in a forward (or backward) position.

Both of the vehicles look very nice when standing next to each other with the rail-wheels raised. As you can see, the digger also has the antenna for traffic control purposes. It is nice to see that LEGO changed some parts of the 1994 vehicle from red/yellow into gray, which makes the digger even more attractive.

One major flaw of both of the vehicles is the magnet. The magnet should be placed at the bottom of the front or back 'plate 3 x 2 with hole'. This makes it impossible to fully retract the rail-wheels and is too low to connect it to a train or engine.

Also placing the magnet on top, improves this situation, although the magnet then still takes up some space under the plate and is then a bit too high for the train magnets. An other issue, is that both vehicles have just one magnet. That makes it impossible to put both behind e.g. a shunter.

As one can see in the inset, a nice feature of the digger is that there is room at the back to store the magnet.

The truck also has enough space at the back to store the magnet there. This compensates a little bit for the problems mentioned before.

Having both vehicles connected to each other on the tracks look really cool, don't you think? The railroad men of my town are really happy about them.

Peeron 4546 / 4525

Lugnet 4546 / 4525

Brickset 4546 / 4525

Bricklink entries 4546 / 4525

Playability: 8/10 (Could have been improved by adding 'dirt' or so, nevertheless especially when combined, both very playable)

Design: 8/10 (nice sets with nice details, missing some extra rail tools that would have been nice)

Price: 7/10 (20 bucks for both of these nice vehicles is quite a nice deal isn't it?!)

Overall: 8/10 (nice sets, would go nicely fit in with train collections between 1980 and now)

Well that was it then, lets get back to work replacing 12V by 9V tracks. The 7760 is lending a hand to the digger while the truck is using the road to get to the next working spot as soon as possible.

It would have been really great to have a "Road N' Rail Maintenance and Repair" set that included both vehicles. Back then, LEGO also did not offer packs of different sets, but actually they should have with these, although there weren't even released in the same year!

But who knows, maybe the wise men at Billund will take notice of this topic and release a new set like this next year along with the new PF trains, so our minifigs get all the help they need to even make the great LEGO railroad tracks even better, cleaner and safer!

[Freddie]

These are some really nice sets that would work independently of what power system is used, or even if you had trains, for that matter (would be better if you did have them, though). One details that keeps nagging me, and which I fixed once I got hold of one, is 4546' lack of normal headlamps. The designers cleverly gave the car a grill and a set of extra-powerful headlamps, but also left out the regular ones and in their place used a pair of yellow 1x1 plates. But I always suspected that it was intended to be so - I've seen that type of trucks before, and they're modified to nearly beyond recognition.

Ah, well. Thanks for the great review(s), JopieK!

[JopieK]

These are some really nice sets that would work independently of what power system is used, or even if you had trains, for that matter (would be better if you did have them, though). One details that keeps nagging me, and which I fixed once I got hold of one, is 4546' lack of normal headlamps. The designers cleverly gave the car a grill and a set of extra-powerful headlamps, but also left out the regular ones and in their place used a pair of yellow 1x1 plates. But I always suspected that it was intended to be so - I've seen that type of trucks before, and they're modified to nearly beyond recognition.

I couldn't agree with you more. About the headlights, it is also very strange that that both sets are missing backlights of course :) In the train business headlights are quite important as 'red lights' stand for: danger ahead, brake immediately.