We buy trucks in Springfield

Springfield’s three rail-yard rows are operated by three different carriers — the Illinois & Midland Railroad, Canadian National and Norfolk Southern. Because no two share an operator, none of the usual duplicate-record questions arise here.

One of the three is a shops facility, which maintains equipment rather than classifying cars, so that row names a function rather than a place. Camp Lincoln and the Capital Airport site sit 2.63 and 4.11 miles from the centroid respectively.

Those three operators are a clue to the kind of work here. A town served by the Midland Railroad, Canadian National and Norfolk Southern separately, and carrying state government, an airport and a Guard installation, does not have one dominant fleet — it has a lot of small ones.

The shops facility 1.66 miles out is worth singling out. Maintenance work brings in service bodies and parts runners rather than line-haul equipment, and those are trucks that spend their lives close to home. Camp Lincoln, 2.63 miles from the centroid, is its own small world of the same thing.

So service bodies, box trucks and day cabs all turn up here in numbers. That reflects three carriers, Camp Lincoln and a state capital sitting in Sangamon County rather than any preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, flatbeds, work trucks and pickups are everywhere, Sangamon County included, and the offer is made the same way on any of them.

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.