We buy trucks in Hillsdale

RiverStone Group runs Midway Stone #45 here, a surface limestone operation, and the federal mine register records 2 employees at it. The haul radius filed against it is 35 miles, taken from freight cost per ton and flagged as an estimate — the same 35 miles a pit ten times the size would carry, because the figure comes from what freight costs per ton and not from how many people work the face.

Twenty-seven records of any kind fall inside that ring and 19 of them are in Iowa, leaving 8 on the Illinois side. The nearest is close — Cleveland Quarry Plant #31 at 3.22 miles, over in Henry County — and the Rock Island Arsenal sits 13.73 miles off.

That headcount is the number most likely to be misread, so it is worth saying what it does and does not imply. A two-person operation is not running its own fleet; stone leaves a pit that size on contract trucks and owner-operator trucks, which is a different population of vehicles from a company yard and a different set of reasons for selling one.

It also does not shrink the 35 miles. The ring is set by what freight cost allows per ton, not by how many people load it, so a truck working out of here covers the same ground a larger pit’s trucks would — and crosses into Scott County, Iowa to do most of it.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the ordinary shape around Midway Stone and its two people, with farm trucks and flatbeds across the rest of a Rock Island County ring 35 miles wide. That is a read off the mine register, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Hillsdale 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.