Cook County
The nearest yard is four and a half miles off, and it is in Chicago
The 97th St yard is operated by Norfolk Southern and its recorded coordinate lies 4.60 miles from the Calumet Park centroid. That is a long reach for a nearest-place attachment, and the reason it is long is that the coordinate does not fall in Calumet Park at all. It falls inside Chicago, which holds a page of its own.
So the row attached to the smaller neighbour rather than to the city containing it. What moves through the yard we could not establish; the 75 miles filed against it is a slice-wide constant flagged as estimated, and the coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point.
Sources: the city-pages node list, its rail-yard coordinate note and the FCC census area lookup, checked 2026-08-24.
Four and a half miles of somebody else’s ordinance
That distance is short for a truck and long for a rulebook. Chicago’s population is far above the 50,000 line at which an Illinois city may set its own weight limits by ordinance, and what it has actually posted we did not determine — so a run of 4.60 miles from here to the gate is not necessarily governed the same way end to end.
It also fixes the shape of the work. A yard drawing off a ring of small municipalities across Cook County is drayage: short moves, many turns, streets rather than highway. That is the driving whatever happens to be in the trailer.
City drayage is stop-start with weight on. The brakes go before the miles do.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and road tractors are the ordinary shape around a Norfolk Southern yard sitting 4.60 miles off, with box trucks, straight trucks and work trucks on the streets of the small municipalities in between. That is a read off the record, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, flatbeds, farm trucks and pickups are used everywhere in Cook County and everywhere else, Calumet Park 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, and it is the ceiling every local one sits under. 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 97th St yard on the Chicago side or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Cook County, and in Blue Island, Riverdale and Alsip 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.