A village against a rail district
Fifteen yards attach to a village of this size
Fifteen rail-yard rows attach to Burnham, under seven carriers — the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad with three, Norfolk Southern with three, the Belt Railway Company with two, the Chicago Rail Link with two, the South Chicago & Indiana Harbor Railway with two, Canadian National with two and the Chicago SouthShore & South Bend Railroad with one.
Ten of those fifteen have coordinates inside Chicago, which holds its own page. Burnham is a village on the southern edge of the city, and the yards nearest it belong to a rail district that pays no attention to the village line.
Source: city-pages node-list, checked 2026-08-24.
Seven carriers in one district means interchange work
Those seven carriers are the whole point. Where that many roads meet, the work is interchange — moving a load from one railroad to another, or from rail to road and back, over very short distances.
The tightest pair here sits 0.06 miles apart, about 317 feet, under two different flags. There is also a mixing centre that re-sorts automotive parts between origin and assembly plant, which transfers freight between rail and road at both ends. That is day-cab and car-haul work, not long-distance running.
Yard work, gate to gate, all day. Hours matter more than miles on a truck that lived like that.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs, road tractors and car haulers are the local shape, across seven carriers from the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad to Canadian National, with the closest two yards 317 feet apart. That is a fact about the district this village sits against, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, dump 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.
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 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.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111 and 5/3-117.1. 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.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Whether you’re alongside the Belt Railway yard on 100th St or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across the surrounding towns, and in Calumet Park, Dolton and South Holland 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.