We buy trucks in Alton

The federal mine register records 51 employees at the Bluff City Mine, and the name is the important part: this is a mine rather than a quarry, the eighth underground stone operation identified in Illinois in this research.

A Norfolk Southern yard sits 1.51 miles from the Alton city centroid. Its coordinate lies outside any incorporated place, so Alton is the attached city rather than the containing one — the ordinary and correct form of that fallback.

That underground distinction changes what a truck does at the gate. Material reaching the surface from the Bluff City Mine is already crushed and graded, so an outbound truck loads finished product from a stockpile rather than shot rock from a face.

It is steadier work than open-pit hauling and it happens on made ground rather than on a bench. The Norfolk Southern yard 1.51 miles away takes what leaves by rail; the rest goes out by road. Same commodity, same dump bodies, a noticeably different day.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, working out of the Bluff City Mine and the yard 1.51 miles from the middle of Madison County’s river town. That is a fact about what is here, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere and are bought on exactly the same terms.

Most of the reasons people sell aren’t happy ones, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.

Those loads all run under one set of numbers. Illinois statute 625 ILCS 5/15-111 sets 80,000 pounds gross for five or more axles, 20,000 pounds on a single axle and 34,000 pounds on a tandem, with no axle inside that tandem over 20,000 pounds, and a formula for consecutive axle groups that varies with spacing.

Local authorities and cities over 50,000 people may set their own weight limits by ordinance, but the same statute stops them exceeding the state maximums. So an Illinois local limit can only ever be lower than the state figure, never higher — which is worth knowing before you plan a route on the state number alone.

That section carries no seasonal frost provisions and no harvest or agricultural exemptions. That is scoped to that section of the statute and is not a claim that Illinois has no seasonal restriction anywhere, which we did not check.

One more number from the same code decides whether a title gets branded. Under 625 ILCS 5/3-117.1(b)(1) a vehicle is salvage once an insurance company pays a total loss claim on it, with two carve-outs: hail damage alone, where it does not affect operational safety, and any vehicle nine model years of age or older, which the registered owner may keep by agreement with the insurer. That second one is a right to ask rather than something the law does on its own. Subsection (b)(1.1) sets a separate test for self-insured companies — salvage where the repair cost, labour included, would come to more than 70% of what the vehicle was worth undamaged.