Coles County
A quarry named after its town, working one site
The federal mine register records 13 employees at Charleston Stone Company, a surface limestone operation. The operator is named for the town and works this one site, on a haul radius of 35 miles taken from freight cost per ton.
In Illinois that shape is the exception. Four numbered-plant networks and several national operators account for most of the state’s stone records, so a single-site operator carrying the town’s own name is not the pattern here.
Sources: MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System, checked 2026-08-24.
An owner-run yard keeps a truck until it is finished
That difference reaches the truck you are selling. A single-site owner-run operation runs on receipts rather than on fleet records, and it keeps a truck until the truck is done rather than retiring it on a policy date.
So the paperwork behind a Charleston Stone Company load looks different from a national operator’s. There may be no maintenance system to print from and a folder of invoices instead. That is still evidence, and it is the thing to dig out of a drawer in Coles County before you sell rather than after.
Receipts are a maintenance record even when nobody ever called them one.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the ordinary shape around the Charleston Stone Company quarry in Coles County, with farm trucks and grain hauls on the same county roads. That is a read off the mine record and the operator’s shape, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Charleston 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, whoever owns the plant. 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 quarry or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Coles County, and in Mattoon, Ashmore and Oakland 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.