We buy trucks in Nokomis

Two crushed-stone operations work this town under names that are nearly identical, and they are not the same business. Heidelberg Materials runs one at 26 employees; an independent company of the same name runs the other at 15.

That is recorded deliberately, so the two are not later mistaken for one. Forty-one people across two separately owned pits is a substantial local trade for a town this size in Montgomery County.

That ownership split is the part a seller will recognise. A driver here could have worked for either operation, and the trucks will not look alike — one on a corporate maintenance schedule under Heidelberg Materials, the other on whatever an independent operator in Montgomery County decides is right.

Neither is better or worse for us. It does mean two trucks of the same year and the same make out of the same town can have had completely different lives, and the paperwork will not tell you which.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, split between Heidelberg Materials and the independent operation across Montgomery County. That is a fact about the two pits, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, farm 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.

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.