Cass County
The yard is outside the town limits, and that is the fact
The Beardstown rail yard is operated by BNSF Railway and its recorded coordinate lies 1.09 miles from the town centroid. It does not lie inside Beardstown. It does not lie inside any incorporated place — Beardstown is simply the nearest place holding a city page, which is how the row attached.
A yard a mile outside the limits sits on somebody else’s roads, and the town’s postings are not the whole answer for it. What moves through the yard we could not establish from anything we read, and the 75 miles filed against the row is a slice-wide estimate rather than a measurement of this one.
Sources: the city-pages node list and its rail-yard coordinate note, checked 2026-08-24.
A mile out of town is a county-road mile
That last part is the one that reaches a truck. Illinois lets local authorities set weight limits lower than the state’s, and outside a town’s limits the authority doing the posting is a different one; where the posted list for a given stretch of Cass County road lives is not something we hold.
So the driving here is rural rather than urban. The 75 miles on the row is a constant, but the local half of it is real enough — short runs on county road to and from a rail head, on roads that were not laid for the loads that use them.
A mile of county road and a mile of state highway are not the same mile, loaded.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and flatbeds are the ordinary shape around a rail head, and out here they are running county road for 1.09 miles to reach one. That is a read off the yard’s own coordinate, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, farm trucks, grain hauls, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere in Cass County and everywhere else, Beardstown 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 out here the straightforward version is often the remote one: we buy it, we arrange the tow, and nobody needs to be standing in the yard on the day. If you would rather we came, we come to you — the yard 1.09 miles out of town or a gate a good way past it. We buy across Cass County, and in Chandlerville, Arenzville and Rushville 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.