Iroquois County
A stone yard in a county with no stone in it
The federal mine register carries an operation here under VCNA Prairie LLC, recorded as Yard 99 — Ashkum, with 5 employees, filed against crushed and broken limestone.
Iroquois County is flat glacial farmland and holds no bedrock aggregate at economic depth, so none of that limestone was cut here. It arrived. What the register is describing is a distribution yard, and a distribution yard exists for exactly that reason — the same relationship as the Houston sales yard out on the Texas Coastal Plain.
Sources: MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System and the county geology note, checked 2026-08-23.
Everything that leaves this yard arrived on a truck first
That changes what the driving looks like. The haul radius recorded against a stone row like this is 35 miles and is flagged as an estimate rather than a measurement — it comes from freight cost per ton, not from geography. Aggregate stops travelling at the point where the freight costs more than the stone.
It also means the loads run in both directions. Material has to be brought into Iroquois County before any of it can be sold back out, which is not how a quarry town works, and it puts a truck under load on the way in as often as on the way out.
Short runs, heavy loads, plenty of them. That is harder on a truck than the odometer makes it look.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the ordinary shape around a yard that moves stone into Iroquois County rather than out of it, inside the 35 miles that freight cost allows. That is a read off the mine record, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Farm trucks, grain hauls, day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Ashkum included, and the offer is made the same way on any of them.
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.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is fine.
Illinois law
What the state lets a truck carry
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 something to check 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.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111. Checked 2026-08-23.
Questions we get asked
- Does it have to run?No. We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it — but a truck that doesn’t start and is otherwise all there is fine. A missing bumper is fine.
- What about the title?We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If yours is lost, a replacement is an $18 counter transaction. If there has never been one, there is a bonded route. Those are the three cases people actually arrive with.
- Do you come out this far?Yes — and if it suits you better, we can buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing in the yard on the day. Whether you’re alongside the stone yard or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Iroquois County — a good deal further than the 35 miles the stone travels — and in Clifton, Gilman and Watseka as well — getting to you is our problem, not yours.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.