A couple of posts back I said I'd received a package ordered off eBay.

If you've been wondering what's inside, then here you go:

These are bags six and seven from Lego set 60098, the latest heavy haul cargo train. Specifically, these are the bags that make up an attractive blue crane, which I decided would be perfect for my attempt at a freight operation. I particularly wanted to use it with the open wagon I had converted from being a unlikely cow transporter to a scrap metal wagon. At some point I would like to dig out my old Lego Technic treads and build a conveyor to move scrap onto using the crane.

I had seen this crane, built and on display, in the Lego Shop, so I knew it looked really good in real life. Sometimes, as with all packaging, Lego looks different out of the box. In the set the crane is paired with a hopper wagon that you can load 1x1 barrels into using the crane scoop. The hopper has opening side doors to unload the barrels back out so you can use the crane scoop to reload them and start the whole play cycle off again.

The hopper is an alright-looking wagon. However, the other two wagons in the set are just flat opens with a JCB style backhoe excavator on one and a helicopter on the other. The excavator looks OK but the helicopter is a very basic looking model. It looks like the kind of Lego toy given away free with newspapers, it's that basic. Neither of those wagons particularly appealed to me and at £140 for the set, with just a loop of track, no points, and a fairly ordinary looking loco, there was no way I was going to buy set 60098.

I was willing to buy the crane as a separate set from a Lego dealer on eBay. Several people buy and break up the larger sets into component parts to sell on eBay. This cost me about £30 once postage was factored in, which is what I would pay if Lego released it as a proper set to sell in stores.

So, to start with I opened bag 7. These are the bits you get.

I quickly encountered my first hurdle:

Yep, that's right. No track was sent with the pack and the very first instruction after building the mini-figures is to put together three pieces of track. Fortunately I had some track to use. But that's something to bear in mind for the future.

Work quickly progressed. Soon we had a base for the crane.

Then we started working on the legs.

You can see in this photo the way the legs and the side walls of the crane pit interlock to enable it to slide backwards and forwards. I've added a circle on the relevant bits.

I really like the black leg spars as they remind me of Lego Space sets I had as a kid.

There was also possibly my favourite detail of the whole build at the end of bag 7 - Safety First!

And there we were, one bag down and halfway done. The rest of the build will be covered in the next blog post.