Four rows, three carriers
One of these is a finished-vehicle ramp
Four rail-yard rows attach to Cahokia Heights under three carriers — Canadian National, the Alton & Southern Railway with two, and Union Pacific.
One of the four is a finished-vehicle ramp, 1.44 miles from the centroid. A ramp transfers vehicles from rail cars onto multi-car road trailers, so the road equipment it serves is car-haul tractor-trailers. Another lies 1.09 miles out; its coordinate falls outside any incorporated place, so its attachment here is the correct nearest-place fallback even though it is named for a neighbouring city.
Source: city-pages node-list, checked 2026-08-24.
A car haul is a particular kind of hard life
That ramp is the one that decides what drives here. Car haulers are long, low and awkward, and they spend their working lives being loaded and unloaded on ramps rather than running open road — in this case an Alton & Southern Railway ramp 1.44 miles from the middle of town.
It is slow, tight, repetitive work with a lot of time at idle, and it is done close to home. What moves through the other three rows we could not establish, so the ramp is the only one this page argues from.
Decks, ramps and hydraulics take the wear on a car hauler. Worth a look before you decide what you have got.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So car haulers and the day cabs working alongside them are the local shape, off an Alton & Southern Railway ramp 1.44 miles from the middle of town. That is a fact about St. Clair County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, dump trucks, work 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 auto ramp 1.44 miles from the centroid or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across the surrounding towns, and in Sauget, East St Louis and Brooklyn 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.