We buy trucks in Plymouth

The O’Neal Quarry, operated by R L O’Neal & Sons, records 11 employees on the federal mine register. Hancock County holds exactly two rows in this dataset, both crushed stone, recording 21 employees between them. Eleven of the twenty-one are here.

The other one, Gray Quarries Inc, is 23.63 miles west. That is a long way for the second half of a county’s stone trade to sit, and it means the two operations do not really share a road network.

That gap matters less than it looks, because the nearest face of any kind is not in this county at all. Central Stone Company’s CS-75 operation at Colchester is 5.47 miles north-east, in McDonough County — less than a quarter of the distance to the other Hancock quarry. So a truck loading here on a given morning is more likely to cross a county line than to see the county’s own second gate.

Past that the spacing is real. The Beardstown rail yard is 34.12 miles south-east, the Junction Quarry at Perry 36.14 miles south, and the Quincy operations 33 to 39 miles south-west. Everything except Colchester is a thirty-mile-plus run.

That is a mixed profile: a short shuttle to one neighbour and genuine road miles to anything else. Stone is heavy and low-value, so the long runs happen only when they have to — but when they do, they happen loaded out and empty back, and the frame and the box take it before the driveline does.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, with R L O’Neal & Sons here, Central Stone Company five miles into McDonough County and Gray Quarries Inc twenty-four miles west. That is a fact about Hancock 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.