We buy trucks in South Pekin

The POWERTON rail yard is operated by the Illinois & Midland Railroad and its coordinate lies 3.10 miles from the town centre, outside any incorporated place, attached here because this is the nearest place holding a city page. The row is named for a generating station.

Whether that station still burns coal, or operates at all, was not determined for this batch, and the name is recorded as unverified. That is not a small caveat. A yard named for a power plant tells you what it was built to do, not necessarily what it does now, and three other generating-station names on rail rows in this dataset have turned out to have changed their reason. So we will say what the register says and no more.

Those are on firmer ground than the name is. The AVENTINE PEKIN yard is 2.18 miles north-east and the Emulsicoat liquid bulk terminal 2.98 miles north-east. The Heart of Illinois Port is 5.61 miles north, and a run of yards follows up the river — COLLIER at 8.23 miles, IOWA JCT at 8.83, ADAMS ST at 9.19 — with a military airfield 8.97 miles north and the Lehigh Hanson river terminal 9.62 miles.

Tazewell County records five rows and four of them are rail yards. There is no quarry in the county at all in this dataset. So the local truck work is freight and liquid rather than aggregate: tank trucks off the terminals, day cabs and straight trucks between the yards and the plants around them.

Short runs, repeated, with heavy loads and a lot of low-speed manoeuvring. That is hours-heavy rather than miles-heavy work, and on a truck from here the hour meter is the more honest record of the two.

So day cabs and tank trucks are the local shape rather than aggregate haulers — Tazewell County records four rail yards and one terminal and no quarry, the Illinois & Midland Railroad works the yard here, and the Heart of Illinois Port is 5.61 miles north. That is a fact about the register, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, 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.