Two yards, one carrier
Both yards here belong to the same railroad
Chicago Heights has two rail-yard rows attached to it, and both are operated by Union Pacific. One is recorded as 26th St, 1.57 miles from the city centroid. The other is the Chicago Heights auto terminal, 1.68 miles out.
They are counted as two facilities rather than one because their names describe different functions — a street and an automobile terminal. That is a call made on the names, not on the distance between them.
Source: city-pages node-list, checked 2026-08-24.
A finished-vehicle terminal puts a particular truck on the road
That second yard is the one that decides what drives here. A finished-vehicle terminal transfers cars from rail cars onto multi-car road trailers, so the road equipment it serves is car-haul tractor-trailers — and this one, the Union Pacific auto terminal, sits 1.68 miles from the middle of town.
What the 26th St yard handles, 1.57 miles out, we could not establish. No source read for this batch names its commodities, so nothing is claimed about it beyond the Union Pacific name and the distance.
A car hauler leads a hard life for its age — loading ramps, tight decks, a lot of time at idle. You know better than we do what that does to one over a few years.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So the mix here leans toward car haulers and the day cabs and road tractors that work alongside them. That is a fact about two Union Pacific yards 1.57 and 1.68 miles from the centroid, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds and work trucks are here too. Not a Chicago Heights thing in particular — they are everywhere, and we buy those the same way.
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. 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.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111 and 5/3-117.1. 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.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Whether you’re alongside the Union Pacific auto terminal 1.68 miles from the middle of town or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across the surrounding towns, and in Thornton, East Hazel Crest and Harvey 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.