McLean County
A Union Pacific yard inside a city big enough to write its own limits
The Bloomington yard is operated by Union Pacific and its recorded coordinate lies 1.92 miles from the city centroid, inside the place. What moves through it we could not establish from anything we read for this page.
Bloomington’s population is above 50,000, and that number matters here for a reason that has nothing to do with size: it is the threshold at which an Illinois city may set its own weight limits by ordinance. What Bloomington has actually posted, we did not determine.
Sources: the city-pages node list and the FCC census area lookup, checked 2026-08-24.
A local limit can only ever go one way
That ordinance power has a ceiling on it, and the ceiling is the useful half. Under the same statute a local authority may set a limit lower than the state’s and may never set one above it, so in Illinois a local number is always a restriction and never a licence.
For a truck working out of a yard 1.92 miles from the middle of Bloomington that is a practical matter rather than a legal one. The run out across McLean County is where the state figure holds; the last mile through town is where somebody else’s number might.
Check the street, not the statute, before a heavy load goes through the middle of town.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and road tractors are the ordinary shape around a Union Pacific yard sitting inside a city, with box trucks, straight trucks and work trucks on the streets around it and on the roads out across McLean County. That is a read off the record and the geography, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, flatbeds, farm trucks, grain hauls and pickups are used everywhere, Bloomington 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 numbers are the ones a local ordinance is measured against. 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. Whether you’re alongside the Union Pacific yard 1.92 miles from the centroid or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across McLean County, and in Normal, Hudson and Heyworth 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.