We buy trucks in Ridgewood

The EAST JOLIET rail yard, operated by Canadian National, is recorded 0.88 miles from here. We are going to be plain about the attachment: that coordinate falls inside the city of Joliet, which has a page of its own, and the row is attached to Ridgewood because Ridgewood is the nearest place the resolver matched. The yard is not in this town. It is next to it.

That is worth saying because the rest of the page follows from where the yard is rather than from whose name is on it. The coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point — every rail-yard row in this dataset is derived that way — so treat the 0.88 miles as a good indication and not a survey.

Inside six miles of that yard: an intermodal ramp at 0.15 miles, the JOLIET yard at 1.19, the Joliet Regional Port at 3.57, the Vulcan Laraway Quarry at 4.27, a liquid bulk terminal at 4.44, the Union Pacific GLOBAL IV yard at 5.05 and a second intermodal ramp at 5.51. Will County records three intermodal ramps and four rail yards inside its twenty-five rows.

Intermodal is a drayage trade, and drayage is a specific kind of hard use: a day cab that never leaves a thirty-mile radius, runs a container on and off a chassis several times a shift, and accumulates hours and clutch wear that the odometer badly under-reports. The nine crushed-stone rows in the same county mean dump trucks work this ground too, but the thing that makes this corner different is the boxes.

If you are selling a tractor that has spent its life on this ground, say so. It is not a mark against it — it just means the hours matter more than the miles, and we would rather know than guess.

So day cabs and drayage tractors are the local shape, with Canadian National on one side and the Union Pacific GLOBAL IV yard five miles south-west. That is a fact about this corner of Will County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, 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.