A ramp and a yard, 0.12 miles apart
Two rows, and you could walk between them
Two rows sit here and they are 0.12 miles apart: an intermodal ramp and the SCHILLER PARK rail yard, the yard recorded 0.57 miles from the town centre and inside the place. An intermodal ramp is where containers come off rail and go onto a chassis, and a yard that close to one is part of the same operation in everything but the paperwork.
That pairing sits inside the densest rail ground in the state. Cook County records 97 industrial rows in this dataset — 61 rail yards and 16 intermodal ramps among them, more of both than any other Illinois county. This page is about a corner of that, not the whole of it.
Sources: the city-pages node list and USDOT rail data, checked 2026-08-24.
Six miles, and you have crossed most of a railroad
Those two are the near end of a chain. The Bensenville intermodal terminal and its yard are 2.10 and 2.12 miles south-west, the Carry Transit liquid bulk terminal 3.02 miles south, the NORPAUL yard 3.29 miles south at Melrose Park, PROVISO #9 3.84 miles south-west at Northlake, the PROVISO yard 4.95 miles south at Stone Park and the GALEWOOD yard 6.16 miles south-east.
Those are drayage distances, and drayage is a specific kind of hard use. A tractor working this ground may never leave a fifteen-mile radius, and it will pick up and set down a container several times a shift. The hours, the clutch, the fifth wheel and the brakes all run well ahead of what the odometer says, and a low-mileage reading on a truck from here means less than it would anywhere else in the state.
Box trucks and straight trucks work the same corridor for the freight that never sees a container. Both are normal here and both are worth the same straight answer.
On a drayage tractor the fifth wheel, the clutch and the brakes tell the real story. The odometer does not.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and drayage tractors are the local shape, with an intermodal ramp 0.12 miles from the yard and the Carry Transit terminal 3.02 miles south. That is a fact about this corner of Cook County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Box trucks, dump trucks, flatbeds, 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.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is fine.
Illinois law
What the state lets a truck carry
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.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111 and 5/3-117.1. Checked 2026-08-23.
Questions we get asked
- Does it have to run?No. We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it — but a truck that doesn’t start and is otherwise all there is fine. A missing bumper is fine.
- What about the title?We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If yours is lost, a replacement is a counter transaction at the Secretary of State. If there has never been one, there is a bonded route. Those are the three cases people actually arrive with.
- Do you come out this far?Yes, and this is easy ground for us. The yard here, the Carry Transit terminal 3.02 miles south, or anywhere else in Cook County — we buy across Franklin Park, Melrose Park and Northlake as well, and if a visit does not suit we can buy it remotely and arrange the tow instead.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.