LaSalle County
Thirteen recorded sites, and only two of them are rail
The yard nearest here is recorded as OTTAWA, worked by CSX Transportation, its coordinate 1.14 miles from the Naplate centroid. It is one of only two rail yards in a county carrying thirteen recorded freight sites — the other is a BNSF yard at Streator.
The rest of the county is mineral. Eight of the thirteen rows report a headcount and they total 341 employees, mostly across industrial-sand and crushed-stone operations at North Utica, Wedron, Troy Grove and Oglesby, with a cement plant at LaSalle. This is sand and stone country with a railway through it, not a rail district.
Source: city-pages node list, from the FRA rail yards layer and MSHA mine records, checked 2026-08-22.
The yard is named for the town next door, and sits in neither
The row is called OTTAWA after the city beside it, but its coordinate lies outside any incorporated place. Naplate is the nearest place holding a page, so the attachment is a nearest-place fallback and correctly so — a name in a rail file points at a locality, not at a boundary.
The coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed gate, as all 2,459 rail-yard rows in this data are. Read 1.14 miles as the distance to the middle of a strip of track, about 4.2 miles short of the Northern White Sand plant at North Utica.
The commodities handled at the OTTAWA yard could not be determined from any source read for this batch, so nothing about what moves through it is claimed here.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
Industrial sand moves in pneumatic tankers and bulk bags, crushed stone moves in dump bodies, and a yard on the edge of the village puts day cabs on the same roads doing local transfer work — Northern White Sand and the Amrize Utica Stone Plant lie 4.2 and 7.4 miles off, and Troy Grove is 13 miles out. That is a fact about thirteen recorded sites across this county, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used 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.
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. 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.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111 and 5/3-117.1. 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.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Whether you’re alongside the CSX yard, out towards North Utica and the sand plants, or nowhere near any of it, we come to you. We buy across this county, and in Ottawa, North Utica and Oglesby 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.