Cook County
A rail yard and a container ramp, a fifth of a mile apart
Two rail rows sit on top of Blue Island. The Burr Oak yard is operated by the Chicago Rail Link and its coordinate lies 0.67 miles from the city centroid, inside the place. An intermodal ramp recorded under the mark IAIS lies 0.19 miles from it, filed as COFC — containers rather than trailers.
They are effectively the same piece of ground and they are not the same job. The ramp’s recorded drayage draw is 150 miles, on the reasoning that past that an over-the-road move competes; the yard carries the slice-wide 75 miles, flagged as an estimate. What either handles day to day we could not establish.
Sources: the city-pages node list, its rail-yard coordinate note and the FCC census area lookup, checked 2026-08-24.
A hundred and fifty miles is a different truck from half a mile
Those two numbers are the whole difference between them. Yard work is local — cuts and trailers moved a short distance, many turns in a day. Ramp work reaches out to 150 miles and home again, which is a road tractor’s day rather than a switcher’s.
So one address in Cook County can hold two quite different working lives. A truck that spent its years inside 0.67 miles of the centroid has done a great deal of stopping; one that ran the ramp’s draw has done a great deal of highway. The odometer tells you which, and not much else does.
Short and heavy, or long and steady. They wear a truck out in different places.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and road tractors are the ordinary shape where the Burr Oak yard and a container ramp share a fifth of a mile in Cook County, with dump trucks and flatbeds on the construction side of it. That is a read off two records, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Box trucks, straight trucks, farm trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Blue Island 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, whether they came off a flatcar or a job site. 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 Burr Oak yard or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Cook County, and in Calumet Park, Alsip and Robbins 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.