One yard, filed twice
The same yard appears in two counties
The PROVISO rail yard is recorded 0.91 miles from the town centre. A second row carrying the same name sits 1.32 miles west, filed under DuPage County and attached to Elmhurst, and a third, numbered nine, is 1.95 miles north-west at Northlake.
Those are segments of one very large yard recorded from different points, not three separate yards. It is worth saying plainly because counting rows here rather than places would triple a single facility — and because the county a row is filed under follows the coordinate, so one yard straddling a county line legitimately appears under both.
Sources: the city-pages node list and USDOT rail data, checked 2026-08-24.
Container ground for five miles in every direction
Beyond that yard the density does not let up. The Northlake intermodal ramp is 0.99 miles west, the NORPAUL yard 2.32 miles north-east at Melrose Park, the Carry Transit liquid bulk terminal 2.55 miles north-east, the Bensenville intermodal terminal 3.08 miles north and its yard 3.44 miles, a second Bensenville row 4.30 miles north-west, and the Schiller Park ramp and yard about five miles north.
Cook County records 97 rows in this dataset, 61 of them rail yards and 16 intermodal ramps — more of both than any other county in the state. What that means on the road is drayage: a tractor working here may never leave a fifteen-mile radius while lifting containers on and off a chassis several times a shift.
That is hours-heavy, miles-light work. A low odometer reading on a truck from this address is not the reassurance it would be somewhere else, and the hour meter, the clutch and the fifth wheel are the honest record.
On a drayage tractor the fifth wheel, the clutch and the brakes tell the real story. The odometer does not.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and drayage tractors are the local shape, with one very large yard on the doorstep and the Carry Transit terminal 2.55 miles north-east. That is a fact about this corner of Cook County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Box trucks, dump trucks, flatbeds, 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 this is easy ground for us. The yard here, the Carry Transit terminal 2.55 miles north-east, or anywhere else in Cook County — we buy across Northlake, Melrose Park and Franklin Park 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.