We buy trucks in Normal

Rivian’s plant here is being expanded for R2 production, with $1.5 billion announced and a thirty-year Illinois incentive package predicated on adding 550 or more employees.

The 1.1 million square foot expansion houses the R2 body shop and general assembly and was described as substantially complete. Once running, the expanded plant is stated to have capacity for 215,000 vehicles a year. A Norfolk Southern yard is attached to the city as well, 2.79 miles from the centroid by nearest-place fallback.

That kind of build changes the truck population twice. While the new body shop and general assembly go up, the traffic is construction — dump trucks, flatbeds hauling steel and equipment, work trucks and service bodies on site every day.

Then it settles into something different: inbound parts and outbound vehicles, which is day-cab and car-haul work. The Norfolk Southern yard 2.79 miles from the centroid handles the rail side of that. Trucks bought for the first phase often come up for sale at the end of it, which is a large part of why anyone reads a page like this.

So flatbeds, dump trucks and work trucks are thick on the ground here at the moment, with day cabs on the freight side and the Norfolk Southern yard 2.79 miles out taking the rail end of it. That is a fact about the county right now, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Box trucks, straight trucks, car haulers and pickups are everywhere and are bought on 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.