We buy trucks in Riverdale

Two rail-yard rows attach to Riverdale under different carriers — CSX Transportation 0.66 miles from the city centroid and the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad 0.81 miles out — so no duplicate question arises between them.

The names are crossed, though. Riverdale holds a row named for Blue Island while Blue Island, which holds its own page, holds a row named for somewhere else again. The names and the filings do not line up.

That crossing is worth stating because a row name looks like evidence and here it is not. A yard named for a neighbouring town, attached to Cook County’s Riverdale, sitting where it sits, is three different pieces of information that can each point somewhere else.

The gates themselves are not confused. Two working yards under CSX Transportation and the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad, both well inside a mile of the middle of town, generate short local drayage whatever the paperwork calls them.

So day cabs and flatbeds are the everyday shapes around two Cook County yards, the CSX Transportation one 0.66 miles out among them. That is a fact about the town, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Box trucks, dump trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Riverdale included, 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.