Madison County
Two rows attach here and neither coordinate is in the village
The Wood River yard is operated by the Kansas City Southern Railway and its recorded coordinate lies 0.99 miles from the East Alton centroid. Close — but the coordinate does not fall in East Alton. It falls inside Wood River city, which holds a page of its own. The row is named for Wood River, sits in Wood River, and is filed to the village next door.
The second row misses by a great deal more. A principal port is recorded 4 miles out and its coordinate reverse-geocodes across the river to Missouri. That record carries its own warning: the city on it is a guess taken from the centroid of a wide-area polygon, flagged as needing checking before use. Nobody has resolved it, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Sources: the city-pages node list, its rail-yard coordinate note, the US Census geocoder and the FCC census area lookup, checked 2026-08-24.
One miss is a filing choice, the other is an open question
Those are not the same kind of error and they are worth keeping apart. A yard a mile away, sitting in the next town and attached to this one, is a filing choice and nothing more — the gate is where it is, and a driver goes there whatever the paperwork says. A port coordinate that lands in another state is a question about whether the row belongs to this side of the river at all.
What that leaves for a truck is simple enough. A Kansas City Southern yard inside a mile of the middle of the village generates short local drayage. The 75 miles filed against it is a slice-wide constant flagged as estimated rather than anything measured here, and what moves through the gate we could not establish from any source read for this batch.
Short legs between a yard and a customer, run over and over. Gate time more than mileage.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and road tractors are the ordinary shape around a Kansas City Southern yard this close in, with flatbeds and work trucks on the industrial side of Madison County. That is a read off the records, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, box trucks, straight trucks, farm trucks and pickups are used everywhere, East Alton 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, whichever side of the village line the gate turns out to be on. 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 yard or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Madison County, and in Alton, Wood River and Bethalto 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.