We buy trucks in Romeoville

The federal mine register records 82 employees at the Romeo Quarry, run by Heidelberg Materials, and 16 at an underground limestone operation run by Vulcan Construction Materials. That second row is named for Lemont and attaches here, because the operations sit between towns in a continuously built-up corridor where a row name is a poor guide to the page it lands on.

The corridor was opened by the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which exposed what the trade called Lemont yellow dolomite — sold as Joliet-Lemont limestone, and locally as Athens Marble. From about 1850 to 1900 it was one of the chief building stones of Chicago and its region.

That underground row is one of seven identified across metropolitan Chicago in this research, spanning Cook and Will counties. Underground stone mining is unusual enough nationally that seven in one metropolitan area is worth naming, and Vulcan Construction Materials works two of them.

It changes the loading. Material reaching the surface from an underground mine is already crushed and graded, so a truck loads finished product from a stockpile rather than shot rock under a face loader — which is what the 82-employee Heidelberg Materials operation up the road implies instead.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers dominate, between the Romeo Quarry and the Vulcan Construction Materials mine beside it in Will County. That is a fact about the corridor, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, mixers, 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.