We buy trucks in Rochelle

A Union Pacific intermodal terminal lies 2.28 miles from the Rochelle city centroid, attached by nearest-place fallback. An intermodal terminal is where containers transfer between rail and road on chassis, so road equipment is built into what it does.

Alongside it, the federal mine register records 8 employees at a crushed-stone plant run by Macklin Materials. Two quite different industries in one Ogle County town.

That pairing is the useful thing here. A container terminal runs on day cabs and chassis tractors doing short, repeated legs to warehouses; a stone plant like the Macklin Materials operation runs on dump bodies loaded at a face.

Both are local work and both are hard on equipment, but they wear a truck in different places. Ogle County holds both at once, so two trucks out of the same small city can have led entirely unalike lives.

So day cabs and chassis tractors work the Union Pacific terminal while dump trucks work the Macklin Materials plant, across Ogle County. That is a fact about the two of them, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

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.