Madison County
Four yards, four different railroads
Four rail-yard rows attach to Venice and every one of them is operated by a different railroad — the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis, Norfolk Southern, the Port Harbor Railroad and Union Pacific. Because no two share an operator, no duplicate question arises among them.
The nearest sits 0.40 miles from the city centroid. A port terminal 1.85 miles out transfers cargo between water, rail and road, so a road interface is built into the facility type — though what actually moves through it was not determined, and no tonnage or commodity is claimed here.
Source: city-pages node-list, checked 2026-08-24.
One row contradicts itself, and we are not going to resolve it
That tidy four-carrier picture has a wrinkle in it worth stating. One row is named for Union Pacific while its carrier field records Norfolk Southern, and another row 1.29 miles away records the Terminal Railroad Association — three different railroads across two names and one carrier field.
The reading that would tidy it up, where two rows record one site once per using carrier, needs both rows to share a carrier field, and these do not. So the contradiction is recorded and left unresolved rather than smoothed over. For a truck it changes nothing: the gates are where they are.
Four railroads inside two miles means four sets of hours and four ways in. Local knowledge beats a map here.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and flatbeds are the shapes that fit four carriers and a port terminal in Madison County, the nearest yard 0.40 miles out. That is a fact about the river bank, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are used everywhere, Venice included, and are bought 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 an $18 counter transaction. If there has never been one, there is a bonded route.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Whether you’re alongside the Union Pacific yard 0.46 miles from the centroid or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across Madison County, and in Granite City, Madison and Brooklyn as well — getting to you is our problem, not yours.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.