We buy trucks in Centralia

Centralia holds two rail yards under different carriers, BNSF Railway and Canadian National, about two miles apart and each distinguished by its carrier in its recorded name. The Canadian National yard lies 1.40 miles from the city centroid and the BNSF yard 1.55 miles.

The Clinton and Marion county line runs through the town, and both yards are recorded as two rows apiece in different counties. The two Canadian National rows lie 0.28 miles apart and are one yard split at that line.

That split is the sort of thing that quietly doubles a town on paper. A scan of all 2,459 rail-yard rows in this corpus found nineteen same-name, same-carrier, different-county pairs, and the short-separation group is exactly this pattern — one facility straddling a boundary, recorded once on each side, 0.28 miles apart in the Canadian National case.

For a truck the boundary is invisible. What is real is two working yards under BNSF Railway and Canadian National about two miles apart, which is enough interchange to keep day cabs and flatbeds busy on short local legs.

So day cabs, flatbeds and box trucks are the everyday shapes around two Marion County yards, the Canadian National one 1.40 miles out. That is a fact about the town, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Centralia 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.

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.