We buy trucks in Tuscola

The federal mine register records 23 employees at an independently named stone company here. A rail yard lies 2.43 miles from the Tuscola city centroid, operated by the Decatur & Eastern Illinois Railroad and attached by nearest-place fallback, its coordinate falling outside any incorporated place.

What that yard handles we could not establish. No source read for this batch names its commodities, so nothing on this page rests on a guess about them.

That combination says something about the scale of the work in Douglas County. An independently owned stone company and a regional railroad are both local businesses, and what they generate is local traffic — short runs between a pit, a yard and the farms and jobs around them.

The Decatur & Eastern Illinois Railroad is a connecting road rather than a trunk carrier, which means loads reach it by truck for onward movement rather than arriving from across the country. That puts the road leg first, not last.

So dump trucks and aggregate haulers work the stone while farm trucks and grain hauls work the country around it, across Douglas County. That is a fact about a 23-employee operation and the Decatur & Eastern Illinois yard 2.43 miles out, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Day cabs, flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Tuscola included, and are bought on 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.