We buy trucks in North Chicago

Naval Station Great Lakes sits on the lake here, and it is the Navy’s only boot camp. It runs to over 1,600 acres and supports more than 50 tenant commands and elements, with over 25,000 sailors, marines, soldiers, airmen and Defense Department civilians.

Recruit Training Command puts more than 38,000 recruits through an eight-week course in a year. Camp John Paul Jones is part of the same station, and its recorded coordinate is 1.16 miles from the city centroid.

Those numbers are the reason the truck population here looks the way it does. A site of over 1,600 acres running more than 25,000 people needs service bodies, box trucks and work trucks — grounds equipment, deliveries, trades moving through the gates of Naval Station Great Lakes all day.

None of that is a claim about vehicles the Navy owns. Camp John Paul Jones, 1.16 miles from the centroid, is part of the same station; what we are describing is the contractors and local businesses working around it, which is who tends to be selling.

So box trucks, service bodies and work trucks turn up here more than they might twenty miles inland. That is a fact about Lake County and the 1,600 acres at its edge, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, dump trucks and pickups are here as well — those are everywhere, 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 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.