Four miles from a prep plant
Close enough to the plant that the trucks come through town
The rail yard here carries this town’s own name and resolves 0.53 miles from the centre, inside the place. What it handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, and the coordinate is a track-polyline mean rather than a surveyed point, as every rail-yard row in this dataset is.
The nearest working site is close enough to matter to the roads. The Pond Creek-Mach coal prep plant is 3.96 miles south, across the line in Williamson County, and the Mach #1 Mine that feeds it is 7.08 miles south-east, recording 231 employees on the federal mine register. That is one of the larger single headcounts anywhere in this state in this dataset.
Sources: MSHA mine records and the city-pages node list, checked 2026-08-23.
Four miles is inside the haul, not outside it
That distance is the whole point. A mine and its prep plant seven miles apart means loaded trucks moving between them constantly, and a town sitting four miles from the plant is on that route rather than near it. The traffic is not passing by; it is working.
Further out the coalfield continues: a second yard 5.86 miles north, the Sugar Camp plant 12.02 miles north-east, the M-Class MC#1 Mine 12.27 miles north-east, the BCR Mine 22.63 miles west and two Hamilton County Coal operations 24.65 and 25.48 miles north-east.
Short heavy runs on a fixed circuit are hours-heavy and miles-light. The box floor, the tailgate, the hoist and the brakes carry that record; the odometer largely does not. On a truck from this address the hour meter is the number worth asking about first.
On a coal hauler read the box floor, the tailgate, the hoist and the brakes. The odometer understates a fixed-circuit truck badly.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So coal haulers and heavy tippers are the local shape, with Mach Mining working a face 7.08 miles south-east that records 231 people and its prep plant 3.96 miles south, inside a Franklin County that records four rows. That is a fact about this ground, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Day cabs, 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.
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 a counter transaction at the Secretary of State. If there has never been one, there is a bonded route. Those are the three cases people actually arrive with.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Here, 3.96 miles south at the Pond Creek-Mach plant, or anywhere else in the coalfield — we come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. We buy across Johnston City, West City and Benton as well.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.