The county with the biggest recorded workforce
A yard in the town, and 341 people around it
The STREATOR rail yard resolves 0.37 miles from the town centre and inside the place — one of the tightest resolutions of any rail row in this state, where the usual figure is a mile or more. What it handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, and its coordinate is a track-polyline mean rather than a surveyed point, as every rail-yard row in this dataset is.
The county it sits in is the point. LaSalle County records 13 rows, and the eight that report a headcount record 341 people between them — the highest county total in this state in this dataset. Four of the thirteen are industrial-mineral operations, which here means silica sand rather than aggregate — Northern White Sand 16.59 miles north-west and the Wedron Plant 21.51 miles north among them.
Sources: MSHA mine records and the city-pages node list, checked 2026-08-23.
Sand one way, limestone the other, and both are trucked
Those 341 people are spread over a wide arc rather than clustered. Northern White Sand is 16.59 miles north-west, the Wedron Plant 21.51 miles north, the Amrize Utica Stone Plant 17.16 miles north-west and the Illinois Cement Company mill 19.30 miles north-west. Southward it is limestone: the Rowe Quarry 14.70 miles south-east and Livingston Stone Company 19.62 miles south. The Vermilion Plant is 13.46 miles north-west, the OTTAWA yard 15.50 miles north and a Bruce Oakley liquid bulk terminal 16.92 miles north-east.
Sand and stone are not the same haul. Silica sand is abrasive and it destroys box liners and tailgate seals; crushed limestone is heavy and it goes after springs, pins and body mounts. A truck that has worked both sides of this county has taken both kinds of punishment, and it is worth knowing which it did more of.
A military training area sits 13.25 miles north-east at Marseilles, so there is some of that traffic on the same roads too.
Sand eats box liners and seals; stone goes after springs and mounts. Check both before you decide what you have got.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So dump trucks, aggregate haulers and sand haulers are the local shape, with Northern White Sand 16.59 miles north-west and Livingston Stone Company 19.62 miles south. That is a fact about LaSalle 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. The yard here, the Vermilion Plant 13.46 miles north-west, or anywhere else in LaSalle 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 Oglesby, Marseilles and Pontiac as well.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.