We buy trucks in Freeport

The Wallace yard is operated by Canadian National, and unlike a good many of the rail records in this part of the state its coordinate falls inside the city rather than out in the township — 1.50 miles from the Freeport centroid, matched within the place radius.

The ring filed against it is 75 miles, and 86 records of any kind fall inside: 44 in Illinois, 23 in Wisconsin and 19 in Iowa. The nearest of them is not close — Byron West-Limestone, 23.10 miles off in Ogle County. A yard with an empty near-ring and a busy far one is telling you where the work is, and it is not next door.

That count comes with a limit on it worth stating plainly. The commodities handled at the Wallace yard could not be determined from any source read for this batch, and Canadian National is not the sort of carrier whose traffic you can infer from the neighbours. That is a gap in what was researched, not a finding that nothing moves through it — an unrecorded commodity and no commodity are different facts, and we are not going to print one as the other.

What does follow from the geography is the shape of a working week. The ring is 75 miles across and 42 of the 86 records inside it are over a state line, so a truck running out of Stephenson County toward the far half of it crosses one most days it goes any distance at all. That puts fuel tax reporting and apportioned plates into the routine rather than the exceptions.

So farm trucks and grain haulers are the ordinary shape across Stephenson County, with flatbeds and dump trucks working the quarry ground toward Ogle County, and day cabs running the long legs into Wisconsin and Iowa. That is a read off the node list, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, aggregate haulers, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Freeport 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. 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 checking 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.