In practical applications, crane systems usually suffer from unfavorable factors, such as parametric uncertainties consisting of unknown friction forces, trolley mass, payload mass, and wire length. Moreover, existing crane control methods cannot guarantee the motion scope of the trolley, since merely asymptotic results, at best, can be obtained because of the nonlinear underactuated nature. Due to unexpected overshoots, existing methods, unless well tuned, may drive the trolley to go beyond the scope of the rail. In this paper, we consider the control problem for underactuated crane systems by considering the aforementioned two points and present an adaptive nonlinear control law. The control framework is established by total energy shaping, and a novel additional term is introduced into the controller to prevent the trolley from running out of the permitted range. We employ Lyapunov-based analysis to prove that the equilibria of the closed-loop system is asymptotically stable. Hardware experimental results are included to suggest that the proposed method achieves increased control performance vis-a-vis existing methods and admits strong robustness with regard to uncertainties and external disturbances, while ensuring the trolley motion range limitation.