We buy trucks in Stewardson

The Brush Creek Quarry, operated by Iola Quarry Inc, records 12 employees on the federal mine register. It is the only row of any type this dataset holds for Shelby County, and its coordinate resolves 3.79 miles from the town by nearest-centroid.

Twelve people is a proper working face rather than an intermittent one — enough for a crusher, a loader and a scale running through a day. That is a real employer on ground where the register records nothing else at all.

That isolation is the fact to plan around. The Effingham rail yard is 14.34 miles south-east, the Siemer Milling Company flour mill 15.59 miles south-east at Teutopolis, and a liquid bulk terminal 18.63 miles south-west. The next stone in any direction is the Pana Limestone Company 29.75 miles west, then the two Nokomis quarries at 31.77 and 31.89 miles.

So stone leaving this gate has nowhere close to go except the jobs around it. Stone is heavy and low-value and does not pay to travel, which means the haul radius here is short and local even though the nearest recorded neighbour is fourteen miles away. Farm and general work fills the rest of a truck’s year.

That mix — some quarry turns, some farm haulage, some general — is harder on a truck than any one of them alone, because the body ends up doing jobs it was not specified for.

So dump trucks and farm trucks are the local shape, with Iola Quarry Inc the only recorded operation in Shelby County and the Siemer Milling Company 15.59 miles south-east. That is a fact about the register, 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.