The county seat
One yard, one mill, and nothing else in the record for miles
The rail yard here is operated by Canadian National and its recorded coordinate lies 1.32 miles from the city centroid, inside the place. What moves through it we could not establish — no source read for this batch names the commodities, so this page does not claim any.
The more useful number is what is missing. Inside eight miles of that yard the record holds exactly one other facility: Siemer Milling at Teutopolis, 4.69 miles away, a wheat mill carrying a 150-mile grain draw. Everything else in this data set is further out than that.
Sources: the city-pages node list, its rail-yard coordinate note and the North American Millers’ Association mill roster, checked 2026-08-24.
Where the record is this thin, the mill is the road work
A yard generates drayage and a mill generates deliveries, and only one of those two pulls trucks in from a long way off. A 150-mile draw for grain arriving by road covers a great deal of farmland, and what serves it is farm trucks, hopper trailers and straight trucks rather than the day cabs a yard implies.
That same company holds three mill records in this data set, in three states. Which is a reminder worth keeping: a firm’s reach and a facility’s reach are different measurements, and the one that decided what a driver’s week looked like is the second. Here that is the 4.69 miles to the gate and the 150 miles the grain came in over.
Harvest work is concentrated and hard, then it stops. The hour meter tells that better than the odometer.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So farm trucks, grain trailers and straight trucks are the ordinary shape around Siemer Milling and its 150 miles of grain draw, with day cabs and flatbeds on the Canadian National side of town. That is a read off two records, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, road tractors, box trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Effingham 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 freight. 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 — or we can buy it remotely and arrange the tow if that is easier. Whether you’re alongside the Canadian National yard, out past Siemer Milling, or nowhere near either, we come to you. We buy across the county, and in Teutopolis, Altamont and Mattoon 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.