Coal country, and the numbers say so
Two rows here, and six more mines within fifteen miles
Two rows attach to this town and they are 5.95 miles apart. The Hawkeye Mine, a bituminous coal operation run by Knight Hawk Coal, records a single employee on the federal mine register — a figure that usually means an intermittent or care-and-maintenance site rather than a working face. The other is a National Guard armory, which is a military-installation row rather than an industrial one.
The county is the story here rather than either row on its own. Randolph County records eight rows — three coal mines, a coal prep plant, a quarry, a flour mill, a river port and the armory — and the four that report a headcount record 235 people between them. That is the second-highest county employee total in this state in this dataset.
Sources: MSHA mine records and the city-pages node list, checked 2026-08-23.
Six coal sites inside fifteen miles
Those 235 people are not all at one gate. Counting outward: the Red Hawk prep plant 6.92 miles south-east, the Knight Hawk Prairie Eagle mine 7.12 miles east, the Peabody Midwest preparation plant 7.77 miles north-east, the Peabody Gateway North Mine 9.60 miles north-east, Prairie Eagle-Underground 10.94 miles east, the Gateway prep plant 12.27 miles north and the Lively Grove Mine 14.87 miles north. Knight Hawk Coal works three of them.
Coal haulage is its own trade and it is hard on equipment in a specific way. The material is abrasive and it is loaded in bulk at a face and tipped at a plant, so the box, the tailgate and the hoist take the punishment while the road miles stay low. A truck can look barely used on the odometer and be thoroughly worked.
The Ardent Mills flour mill is 13.54 miles south-west and the Kaskaskia Regional Port 15.52 miles north-west, so there is grain and barge work on the same roads. But the shape of the fleet around here is set by coal.
On a coal hauler read the box floor, the tailgate and the hoist first. The odometer is the least useful number on the truck.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So coal haulers and heavy tippers are the local shape, with Knight Hawk Coal working three faces inside eleven miles and Peabody Midwest Mining two more. That is a fact about Randolph County, 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.
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. Here, 6.92 miles south-east at the Red Hawk plant, or anywhere else in Randolph County — we come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. We buy across Steeleville, Coulterville and Chester as well.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.