We buy trucks in West Chicago

West Chicago is its own city in DuPage County, about 30 miles from Chicago rather than a piece of it. That distinction matters in this data, because a row named for one place and sitting in another gets attached to the wrong city more often than you would think. This one is attached correctly.

The yard is Union Pacific, and its recorded coordinate lies 0.81 miles from the city centroid — closer in than most. What moves through it we could not establish; no source read for this batch names its commodities.

That distance — 0.81 miles from the middle of town to the Union Pacific yard — is what shapes the driving here. Work that starts and ends at a yard inside the city limits is short-haul work: day cabs and straight trucks doing runs measured in minutes rather than states.

Thirty miles out from Chicago puts a good deal of the metro inside an easy out-and-back. A truck can do that leg several times in a day and sleep at home, which is a different kind of wear from a long-distance rig with the same odometer reading.

So day cabs, box trucks and straight trucks are the common shapes here. That follows from a Union Pacific yard 0.81 miles out and 30 miles of road to Chicago, and it is not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.

Dump trucks, flatbeds, work trucks and pickups are here too — used everywhere, not a DuPage County thing in particular, and 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.