We buy trucks in Casey

Two crushed-stone operations sit here on the federal mine register, and they are run by different companies: Casey Stone Company at 14 employees, and the Mid-Illinois Quarry at 11.

Twenty-five people across two independently operated sites is a real local trade rather than one pit with a second name. It is also unusual in this lane, where two stone rows in one town more often turn out to share an operator.

That independence matters more than the headcount. Casey Stone Company and the Mid-Illinois Quarry set their own hours, their own loading arrangements and their own haulage, so a driver working Clark County stone deals with two operations rather than one.

The work itself is what stone work always is: loaded out, empty back, short runs, on and off unpaved ground at both ends. It uses a truck up faster than the mileage suggests, and it does it to the frame and the body before the driveline.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, split between Casey Stone Company and the Mid-Illinois Quarry in Clark County. That is a fact about the two of them, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere and are just as welcome, 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.

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.