We buy trucks in Prairie du Rocher

This operation records 18 employees on the federal mine register. It is the only crushed-stone row in Randolph County, which otherwise reads as coal ground: three coal mines, a coal prep plant, a flour mill, a river port and a military installation. Four of the county’s eight rows report a headcount and record 235 people between them.

The row carries two names. It is recorded as Mississippi Lime Co-Prairie du Rocher, while the operator on the register is Bluff City Minerals, LLC. Both names are real and they are not interchangeable — one is what the site has long been called, the other is who files for it now. If someone locally calls it by the older name, that is why.

Not all of that stone leaves by road. The Kaskaskia Regional Port is 12.31 miles north-east, and a river port that close changes the arithmetic on heavy, low-value stone: the road leg becomes a short drayage to the barge rather than the whole delivery, and short drayage means many turns a day on the same few miles.

The nearest other quarry is the Columbia Quarry Company’s Waterloo Plant #7, 13.08 miles north in Monroe County. Everything else near here is coal: the Knight Hawk Hawkeye Mine 21.37 miles east at Sparta, the Gateway prep plant 25.12 miles north-east at Tilden, and the Peabody Gateway North Mine 27.37 miles east. The Ardent Mills flour mill at Chester is 21.46 miles south-east.

So the fleet here is doing two different jobs — short heavy runs to the river and longer hauls east into coal country — and a truck bought here may have done a lot of one and none of the other. Worth asking which.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, with Bluff City Minerals, LLC working the county’s only limestone face and the Kaskaskia Regional Port twelve miles north-east. That is a fact about Randolph 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.