*GOLD BRICK SET*

To review without mentioning childhood nostalgia, favourites or overuse of the term 'classic' may be helpful for an open minded description but working with some general comparison to sets up until this point should promote fairness.

Minifigures:

• Policeman with flat white cap- probably Chief.
• 2x white helmeted, zip top cops as bike rider and pilot.
• Plain clothes staff member in red top and blue trousers.

The most interesting addition is the staff member as operations room assistant, helipad landing crew (see the batons in picture) or detective. Likewise the Fire Station set of a similar year got a plain clothes staff woman.

Justice Central

The Police station looks good in its use of blue trim and seems suitable when most of the designs are obviously black and white. Some of the town buildings like this appear almost mid 20th C in design but interpretation goes a long way with earlier sets with more simple imagery. Currently creating Police variants, Lego Police are generic but could be conceived as European or North American.

Of the main building, the garage is a fantastic feature with segmented bricks that fit in to groove bricks for sliding door action and plenty of secure windows and blue clear skylights. There is a covered yard area where entrance to the office and essential prison cell with 'bars' is easy. The upstairs office has a smart red telephone brick, radio and chair as a room of operations. The roof features spotlights, an ariel mast and siren/loudspeakers.

Outside the open yard consists of a helipad symbol thats effective and fun, parking lines, a decorative flower bed and a really smart police sign at the front. The build is extensive, satisfying and clean, augmenting interactive zones of imagination through enclosure. The garage's bricks with slots allow the segmented door to effectively close

off that part. The layout of the build has good composition and is rewarding as you have completed sections or moved up a level. The additional features decorate well and polish the design.

The three vehicles car, motorbike and helicopter are the basis of much play and action. The helicopter is chunky and has a great lift up clear cockpit with control stick and radio clipped on, thick grey blades and smart black and grey design in general. The car is a standard 4 stud wide car design with a nice black bonnet stripe for perhaps the station chief and double blue lights. The motorbike has one blue light and the attractive clear police windshield.

Top Cop Shop

This larger build set with its vehicles, characters and action provides children of any year with an exciting build, fun layout feature and endless play ideas. This is another potential Town theme flagship set but is not as popular as later Police stations. If you can preserve, re-build or find this set, it is worthwhile as a more straight forward Police Station but with a possibly much better helicopter and building colour scheme and is generally evocative of a theme of 20th C decades. Its all down to personal preference but I think this one is worth promotion.

I have just finished re-building this model for the first time in over 20years. My son has some of the newer Police lego and he desparately wants a Police Station to house all his 'robbers'. It took me about 2 hours to seive through kilos of bricks - but finally I managed to build it and between us have been playing for hours. The model was missing a couple of specialist pieces (i.e. two blocks for the roller door) but apart from that it looks mint. Compared with the 2010-2011 version it is very much a rural police station. The sort that could be found in remote towns all over Europe. No mod cons and a helly pad that only just accomodates the 2011 version.

Fire station next - then burger bar, garage, service station, town house and bike shop. And don't get me started on the space lego of the same era. Sooooo glad that I kept this stuff for my children (and me) to enjoy. How can a toy bought 25 years ago and still being played with today be anything less than 5*

With the new 2011 City Police out, I feel like pulling out my old Police sets and comparing them to the newer sets to see what I want to get or add.

This set has got to be the oldest Police Station in the archives. I didn't find anything older then this at 1983. There's lots of newer sets, many of them are very similiar but don't and hadn't made enough changes to this classic original to convince me over the years to buy a new Police Station set. 2011 may change that.

This set is classic just for it's age and year. 4 minifigures are included in the set. 3 of whom are police men and a 4th who's a dispatcher or officer worker. You see him there on the picture waving a pair of signal signs to the Helicopter.

Three vehicle are found in this set, Helicopter, Motorcyle and Squad Car. Just enough to get someone started on protecting and patroling their Lego streets. The helicopter is a rather old design and there have been many newer models and designs to come out over the years that are better then this one. But this one stays as a classic. The motorcycle is very decent. Anytime a set included a new police motorcyle, I always added it to the Station to form a Patrol Squad. The same with the car, I think a very close duplicate of this set was available as a small set. It too is a decent build for it's day and age.

The building itself while an older design is good with a garage for the Squad Car to park in and a roll down door. There's a helicopter pad to park the copter on or land it. And a bay inside, underneath the main building for the motorcycle. Inside there's a jail cell and a dispatch office upstairs with desk, phone, computers and chair. So there were some good details for elements of it's day.

Old, new, inbetween. Any police station for a Lego City is a must.

I had a review written for this which ultimately turned out far too long to my liking, so you can consider this a redux version (shorter, not longer like, say, Apocalypse Now - I hope).

About a year or two ago I bought a pile of old Duplo with what seemed to be some regular Lego thrown in so imagine my surprise when that pile of lego turned out to be a lot bigger than anticipated: this set (minus car), #6364 Paramedic Unit (minus car), #6363 Auto Repair Shop (minus tow truck) and #6382 Fire Station (minus chief's car, what happened with all those cars?), all including instructions and lots of bricks I haven't sorted through yet. Even though I had the catalogues in which this set appeared according to Brickset (thanks for uploading all those old catalogues, by the way) I had no recollection of this particular station at all, the police station of my childhood was #6386 Police Command Base so no nostalgia filter for this one?

As seems to be standard for a Lego police station, there's a motorcycle, a car and a helicopter included. The motorcycle is grey, not white like later police motorcycles and it has that nice, (rather rare) printed motorcycle windscreen! The 'police' tiles are stickers though. The car is a typical eighties Lego car on a black 4 x 10 base, if you've built one car from that decade you know how to build this one too (I had enough spare parts to build it, there's nothing special parts-wise). Incidentally, this is the only 'normal' police patrol car we have, all our other police cars are either vans or 4x4's. On the helicopter, I like the cockpit formed by two windscreens but other than that it is rather square and bulky - especially that landing gear and the wide tail boom, where later helicopters made noticeable improvements. The worst offender to my mind is that construction technique where you take a 1 x 1 plate with ring and push an antenna through (especially since this is the early - read: thin - version), every so often this caused the ring to just break off... and taking the antenna out again was even worse.

The building itself is very basic and consists of a jail next to a room which only purpose seems to be to have a door? Which is undermined again by the open wall right next to it, strange. Above these rooms is an office with some printed computers and a red 1 x 2 sloped brick with telephone print (without receiver, also strange as some other sets we have used to place a 1 x 2 tile on top). Half the office remains unused, there's only one desk with a chair inside. A turntable for the chair would have made it a lot easier to seat an officer there but it's not like taking out the chair and placing it back is that hard either. Lucky for us the old-fashioned TV-antenna is still present and in perfect condition as these were rather fragile. The garage is the best part here, the blue skylight is maybe a choice that would feel better at home in classic space but I like the bluish sheen it creates inside. The thing I love most about it however, is that it is one brick higher than the garage in #6386 and therefore can accommodate all those 4x4's our #6386 could not, like #6533 Police 4 x 4 or the jeep from #6354 Pursuit Squad. For this reason alone I'd love this station better!

You don't want to know how long version 1 of this review was... But for those who want it even shorter:

Good: motorcycle with windshield, four minifigures (three policemen and one civilian to give whatever role you want: office worker, janitor, prisoner...), a bigger garage with coloured skylight able te house taller vehicles, nice white/blue/black colour scheme (which I wish was continued on the vehicles) and good playability.

Bad: a quite dated helicopter and the station layout is rather strange; to reach the door or to exit the garage you pass the helicopter landing pad, next to the entry door is another doorway but without a door, very few details and of those details several could use some more refinement.

Overall though, given its age this is definitely not a bad attempt and in some aspects beats even newer (ok, less vintage) police stations!

This was my first major set as a kid. I would have received it as, I think, a Christmas present or possibly a birthday gift.

I have always tended to keep my sets built up, and this one has remained intact for probably the last 18 years.

Parts

There are some great components here. I know that the one piece motorcycle has a controversial reputation, but I remember it being awesome as a kid, and I still love it. The attachment points on the rear permit some modification, but the one piece (well, two, technically) of the chassis permits a level of realism that the old multi-part bikes don't. And the saddle design--genius.

I love the windscreen with its prominent POLICE blazon.

The garage door is another play-marvel. It moves so smoothly and provides great tactile interaction with the set.

Minifigures

The four figs are set appropriate. Other reviewers have noted the lack of a "criminal", but even as a child, I figured the looked like everybody else, and so many of my other MFs spent time in lockup. The Chief, the two Patrolmen, and the civilian signal-waver are useful and "fill" the available slots in the station.

As a child, I do remember thinking that the civy was a waste--who wouldn't want more black-clad patrolmen, if given the choice? But as an adult, I see the value of a jobber to pass meals to the prisoners and to sweep the floors. I guess the set could use a broom....

The completed model

A garage, a breezeway for the biker cop to maintain his hog, and a workstation with a terminal comprise the "working area" on the main level. All are connected by doors that permit the passage of the policemen as they perform their duties. The cell is fairly large--I know, as a child, I determined the maximum occupancy by jamming a lot of MFs in there, but I don't recall the number. I figure maybe 8 could squeeze in. One can sit quite comfortably on the included bench, though he (or she) can't lie down.

The Captain's office features a standard and inverted terminal and a red phone (for EMERGENCIES!!). The office's tilting windows suggest a lack of AC, but permit a wide view of the yard. The office is quite large, and it seems like another seat and desk would be appropriate, but I guess the patrolmen should be standing when the Chief bawls them out for being cowboys.

The printed baseplate clearly delineates the yard, which is nicely landscaped with some flowers and also features a prominent POLICE sign.

On top of the building, there is the previously mentioned motorcycle, as well as a helicopter and a cruiser. Both are cool builds. The cruiser is a standard one MF Lego car. The helicopter suffered many a catastrophic crash over the years, but retains it's magic for me--it's a friggin' helicopter, which, if you're a kid, is all the awesome.

Overall opinion

Having written this, now I have to go home and get the set out. I know there are a few damaged pieces that could use replacement.... Hello, Internet shopping!