We buy trucks in Sycamore

Sycamore has a crushed-stone quarry on the federal mine register, and that register lists one employee at it. We are stating that as the recorded figure and nothing more.

One employee does not establish what a site is currently doing, and nothing else we found does either. Illinois publishes no per-site aggregate register: the state permit data covers coal, and the reachable Illinois State Geological Survey producer directory dates from 1997. So the honest answer about the Sycamore Quarry today is that we do not know.

That gap is worth being straight about, because the tempting move here is to write a page about limestone and haul roads on the strength of one register line. We are not going to.

The newest producer directory the State Geological Survey publishes dates from 1997, and the state Department of Natural Resources permit data covers coal rather than stone. A directory that old is not a description of anyone’s business today. Which leaves the general case, and the general case is still useful: a town this size runs on dump trucks, box trucks and work trucks doing local work, whatever the quarry is or is not doing this year.

So the mix we would expect around Sycamore and the small De Kalb County towns near it — Monroe Center, Hampshire — is the ordinary one: dump trucks, box trucks, day cabs, flatbeds. That is a general read and not a claim about any operation on the mine register, and it is certainly not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Straight trucks, service bodies, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, here 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.