Randolph County
A flour mill, and four things about it nobody established
The industrial row attached to Chester is the Ardent Mills flour mill. It carries a members’ listing with the millers’ association, the grain recorded against it is wheat, and its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Randolph County.
What is not established is most of what you would want next. Capacity, wheat classes, throughput and shipping mode were not obtained, and the figures from the ADM Decatur complex are not a stand-in — another mill’s numbers are not this mill’s numbers. The 150 miles filed against the row is an estimate of draw rather than a measurement.
Sources: the city-pages node list and the mill’s own member listing, checked 2026-08-23.
What a mill needs from trucks, without pretending to know how much
That gap is why this section is short rather than padded. A mill takes grain in and sends flour out, and some share of both legs is truck work — but with no throughput and no shipping mode on the record, how much of it is truck and how much is rail or barge is not something this page can tell you.
So the one figure the row does carry is 150 miles of estimated draw. If your truck ran grain into Randolph County or flour back out of it, the seasons and the miles behind it are things we will ask you about rather than assume from a dataset.
Seasonal work puts a year of wear into a few months. That does not show on an odometer either.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So the honest read on the mix here is a general one. Grain hauls and farm trucks are what moves around the Ardent Mills plant in Randolph County, with day cabs and flatbeds on the roads through it, and none of that is dressed up as a local measurement. It is certainly not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Chester 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, grain or flour. 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 — and if it suits you better we can buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be there on the day. Whether you’re alongside the mill or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Randolph County, and in Steeleville, Sparta and Red Bud 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.