We buy trucks in East St. Louis

Three rail-yard rows attach here under three carriers — the Alton & Southern Railway, Norfolk Southern and the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis. One is named for its own carrier rather than for a place, which is unusual in this data and makes it easy to read as a company rather than a facility.

One of the three is a transload, 1.34 miles from the centroid. A transload exists to move freight between modes, rail to road or road to rail, so that row names a road interface directly. What commodity moves through it was not determined.

That is the row worth dwelling on, because most yards imply road traffic while a transload states it. Freight arriving by rail leaves by road and the reverse, which means tractors and trailers at the gate as a matter of function rather than as an inference — and this one sits 1.34 miles from the centroid.

One of the three rows has its coordinate inside Cahokia Heights, which holds its own page, so the three are not as tightly clustered as the count suggests. St. Clair County packs a lot of railroad into a short distance and the municipal lines run straight through it.

So day cabs and flatbeds are the shapes that fit three carriers and a transload 1.34 miles out. That is a fact about the Alton & Southern Railway and its two St. Clair County neighbours, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are everywhere and are bought on exactly the same terms.

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.

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.