We buy trucks in Quincy

The federal mine register records 120 employees at the Quincy Plant — the largest crushed-stone row in Illinois in this research — with 29 at the Quincy Mine and 11 at an operation recorded as a portable plant. That is about 160 people across three sites in one Adams County town.

Two of the three belong to Huber Carbonates and sit 0.37 miles apart, close enough to work as one place; the third is run by Central Stone Company about seven miles off. Huber runs four operations across four states, all under crushed-stone commodity codes.

That commodity code is misleading, and it is worth saying so. Huber Carbonates produces ground calcium carbonate for paper, paint, plastics, sealants and fillers — product that moves in pneumatic tankers, bulk bags and palletised vans rather than in dump bodies.

So the biggest stone operation in the lane is not a stone operation for trucking purposes at all. A page that read the commodity code and wrote about haul roads and shot rock would have got the equipment wrong on the strength of a classification. What Central Stone Company runs seven miles away is a separate question this page does not answer.

So pneumatic tankers and vans work the Huber Carbonates side while dump bodies work Central Stone Company, across Adams County. That is a fact about what the operators here actually make, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere and are bought 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.