We buy trucks in Granite City

One rail-yard row attaches to Granite City. It is operated by Norfolk Southern and its recorded coordinate lies 1.65 miles from the city centroid, inside the place.

The row is named for a manufacturer. Whether that company operates at this location was not determined, so the name is recorded as unverified rather than as a live industrial identification — and this page does not build an argument on it. A name in a data set is not evidence that a business is still there.

That Norfolk Southern yard, 1.65 miles from the centroid, is the one thing here we can state plainly, so it is what the rest follows from. A working yard needs road equipment to move what comes off the cars — day cabs for the short legs, flatbeds for anything that will not fit in a box, dump trucks where bulk is involved.

We are not going to dress that up into a claim about a particular industry. The commodity mix is not in anything we read, and the manufacturer name on the row was never verified, so inventing an industry from it would be worse than leaving the question open.

So day cabs, flatbeds and dump trucks are the shapes a yard town tends to hold. That is a reasonable read of one Norfolk Southern facility 1.65 miles out, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are everywhere, here included. 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.

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.