We buy trucks in Cave-In-Rock

Four crushed-stone operations sit at Cave-In-Rock, recording 112 employees between them — 48, 45, 10 and 9 — in a village of a few hundred people in the least populous county in Illinois. That ratio is the single most striking thing in this data set.

Hardin County was the largest fluorspar-producing area in the United States and the focal point of a district that worked from the 1840s until 1995, when the last mine closed. The limestone of the river bluffs remained, and four operations still work it.

That river is the constraint everything else bends around. There is no bridge here — the Ohio River crossing to Kentucky is a ferry. A load bound south is therefore planned around a sailing timetable, or driven a long way round to a bridge.

Whether the ferry carries loaded aggregate trucks, and at what weight, we could not determine, so we are not going to tell you how to route one. What we can say is that a truck working out of Hardin County has spent its life on a small number of roads with a hard limit at the end of one of them.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers dominate, with pneumatic tankers on the carbonate side. That is a fact about four operations working the Ohio River bluffs in Hardin County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Flatbeds, day cabs, 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.