The mine record
Three employees on the register, and not much else
The federal mine register records 3 employees at Columbia Plant #1, a surface limestone operation run by the Columbia Quarry Company. The haul radius filed against it is 35 miles, taken from freight cost per ton and flagged as an estimate.
Three people is a small record and it does not establish what the site is currently doing. The county on that record is St. Clair County, which is where the plant is filed rather than a statement about where the town sits, so it is set down as the register has it and nothing is built on top of it.
Sources: MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System, checked 2026-08-24.
A small record is a small claim, and that is the whole of it
That is deliberately all this page says about the quarry. Three employees on a mine register does not give you a fleet size, a haul pattern or a customer, and a page that built a local fleet out of it would be describing something nobody measured.
So what is left is the 35 miles a stone haul travels out of a plant filed to St. Clair County. Inside that circle there is stone work and the trucks that do it are dump trucks and aggregate haulers. Past it, this page is not going to guess.
If your truck ran stone out of here, you know those roads better than the register does.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the ordinary shape around the Columbia Quarry Company plant filed to St. Clair County, and that is a read off a three-employee mine record rather than a strong local claim. It is certainly not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Farm trucks, grain hauls, day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Columbia 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, whatever the plant record says. 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 Columbia Quarry Company plant, anywhere inside the 35 miles its stone travels, or nowhere near either, we come to you. We buy across the towns around here, and in Dupo, Waterloo and Millstadt 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.