We buy trucks in Palestine

Two things are recorded here. Lawrence Gravel, Inc. #2 is a construction sand and gravel pit with 5 employees on the federal mine register. The PALESTINE rail yard, operated by the Indiana Rail Road, sits 4.05 miles away from it.

Crawford County holds four rows in all: this pit, this yard, a second rail yard and a liquid bulk terminal. The pit is the only mining operation of any kind recorded in the county, so sand and gravel is not one trade among several here — it is the trade.

The Indiana Rail Road is a short line rather than a trunk carrier, and that changes what a yard is for. What the PALESTINE yard actually handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, so we are not going to tell you what moves through it. What we can say is that the yard coordinate is recorded 0.58 miles from the town centre by nearest-place fallback, and that the coordinate itself is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point — every rail-yard row in this dataset is derived that way.

Lawrence Gravel Inc runs a second plant 15.36 miles north at West Union, in Clark County. One operator, two pits, fifteen miles apart, with a short-line yard in between: that is a fleet doing repeated short runs on rural blacktop rather than long deliveries.

Robinson is 6.40 miles south-west and carries the county’s other yard and its liquid bulk terminal. Between the two towns you have most of what Crawford County records.

So gravel trucks and dump trucks are the local shape, with Lawrence Gravel, Inc. and the Indiana Rail Road four miles apart and the West Union pit fifteen miles north. That is a fact about Crawford County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere and are just as welcome, 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.