We buy trucks in South Elgin

The mine recorded as Amrize The R S & D Mine, operated by Amrize Mid-America, records 21 employees on the federal mine register. Kane County holds five rows in this dataset — two crushed-stone quarries and three sand and gravel pits, and nothing else at all — recording 82 employees between them. Twenty-one of those eighty-two are here, which is the largest single count of the five.

Every row in this county is a pit. There is no rail yard, no terminal, no mill on the county’s books in this dataset. Whatever moves out of Kane County in this data moves by road.

Those five are not five separate businesses. Amrize Mid-America works three of them: this mine, the Elburn Sand & Gravel pit 10.37 miles south-west and the Conco Western Stone quarry 12.03 miles south. The Beverly Materials West Pit is 7.75 miles north-east, and the Vulcan Construction Materials Bartlett Underground Quarry is 3.83 miles north-east across the county line into Cook.

That nearest one is underground, and an underground haul is its own kind of work: ramp grades, low clearance, a fixed circuit rather than a road route. It shows in the brakes and the underside long before it shows in the odometer.

For everything else the pattern is ordinary aggregate work over four to twelve miles — loaded out, empty back, several turns a day, on and off unpaved ground at the pit end. The WEST CHICAGO yard is 7.87 miles south-east and the EOLA yard 14.38 miles south if anything needs to reach rail.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers are the local shape, with Amrize Mid-America working three of the five Kane County rows and Vulcan Construction Materials 3.83 miles north-east. That is a fact about this ground, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, 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.