Ten yards in one county
A rail county, and this yard is in the middle of it
The POAG rail yard is recorded 1.72 miles from the town centre by nearest-place fallback. What it handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, and its coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point, as every rail-yard row in this dataset is.
The county around it is another matter, and it is unusually rail-heavy. Madison County records 16 rows and ten of them are rail yards, with two crushed-stone quarries, two sand and gravel pits and two liquid bulk terminals making up the rest. Four rows report a headcount and record 65 people between them.
Sources: the city-pages node list and USDOT rail data, checked 2026-08-24.
Nine more inside nine miles
Those ten yards are packed tight. The Mitchell yard is 2.74 miles south-west, Wilds 4.78 miles north-west, Wood River 6.40 miles north-west, the A O Smith yard 7.04 miles south-west, the Tri-City Regional Port yard 8.38 miles south-west, Federal 8.43 miles north-west and the Madison yard 8.61 miles south-west. A river port sits 7.17 miles north-west and a liquid bulk terminal 7.65 miles south-west. The Madison County Sand pit is 5.41 miles south.
Nine rail facilities and a port inside nine miles is a switching district rather than a line-haul corridor. The truck work that goes with it is drayage and transloading: short runs between yards, terminals and the plants around them, done many times a day.
Tank work is a large part of it here given the terminals, and a tank barrel keeps its own record of what it has done. If you have one to sell, tell us what it last carried and whether it has been cleaned. That is a normal question on this ground, not an awkward one.
On a tank truck, check the barrel, the pump and the hose reel before anything else. Those carry the hours the odometer does not show.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So tank trucks and day cabs are the local shape, with ten Madison County rail yards inside nine miles and the Madison County Sand pit 5.41 miles south. That is a fact about this ground, 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.
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 on this ground we are out often. The POAG yard, the Mitchell yard 2.74 miles south-west, or anywhere else in Madison County — we buy across Wood River, East Alton and Mitchell 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.