We buy trucks in Wamac

The row recorded here is a Canadian National yard, 0.96 miles from the town centre. A row of exactly the same name sits 0.28 miles north, filed under Marion County and attached to Centralia. Those are two recordings of one yard from two points on the same track, not two yards.

The other Centralia yard does the same thing: a BNSF row 2.62 miles north filed under Marion and a second BNSF row 3.20 miles north filed under Clinton. Two physical yards, four rows. Clinton County’s entire recorded industrial base in this dataset is two rows, and both of them are second recordings of yards at Centralia.

It matters because the obvious way to describe this place would be wrong. Counting rows rather than places gives four yards clustered here; counting places gives two. A page built on the first number would tell a seller that this is twice the railroad town it is, and would be doing it with real data honestly recorded.

What is actually true is straightforward. Two yards, two carriers, inside about three miles — and then nothing. The next yard is 15.74 miles north-east at Salem. The nearest quarry of any kind is the Keyesport sand and gravel pit 20.61 miles north-west. The coal country south-west starts at 31.58 miles.

So this is a two-carrier rail town in open farm country, and the truck work is what that implies: day cabs and straight trucks on local freight, farm trucks through the season, and general haulage that runs real distances because there is nothing close by to shuttle to.

So day cabs and farm trucks are the local shape, with two carriers inside three miles and the Keyesport Sand & Gravel pit 20.61 miles north-west being the nearest quarry. That is a fact about Clinton County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, 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.

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.