We buy trucks in Pontiac

Three separate crushed-stone operations are on the federal mine register at Pontiac. Livingston Stone Company records 15 employees, the operation recorded as Yard 88 records 11, and the Rowe Quarry records 3.

Twenty-nine people across three sites is a real local trade rather than a single pit. All three attach to Pontiac by the mine register’s own town field rather than by a measured distance, and their coordinates are not on top of each other. The Rowe Quarry and Yard 88 lie 10.02 miles apart, with Livingston Stone Company between them at 5.36 and 5.45 miles. Three gates spread across ten miles of one township is a different road pattern from three gates in a town, and it matters more for how trucks move than the headcount does.

Those three sites are spread over about ten miles, which is still short-haul ground for stone: a truck working here is more likely to shuttle between them and the jobs around town than to run one long delivery. Stone is heavy and low-value, so it does not travel far by road if anyone can help it. Two more faces sit about 8 miles off at Fairbury — the McDowell Quarry and the Metz Quarry — under the same operator as the Rowe Quarry and Yard 88, which between them work four of Livingston County’s five recorded rows and 21 of its 36 recorded employees.

That is loaded-out, empty-back work, several turns a day, on and off unpaved ground at both ends. It uses a truck up faster than the mileage suggests and it does it to the frame and the box, not just the driveline.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, three registered operations deep. That is a fact about Livingston Stone Company, the Rowe Quarry and Yard 88, spread over 10.02 miles of Livingston 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.