We buy trucks in Wood River

The row attached to this town is the WILDS yard, 1.47 miles from the centre and inside the place. A separate yard carrying this town’s own name sits 1.63 miles north and is attached to East Alton instead.

That crossover is worth stating first because a name is the thing people reach for. The yard called after this place is not the yard filed against it, and both are real. Neither one’s commodities could be determined from any source read for this batch, and both coordinates are track-polyline means rather than surveyed points.

Those two are the near end of a dense district. The Federal yard is 3.86 miles north-west, the Martin Marietta Bluff City Mine 4.33 miles north, the Poag yard 4.78 miles south-east, the Mitchell yard 6.33 miles south, the A O Smith yard 9.69 miles south, a liquid bulk terminal 9.85 miles south-west, the Madison County Sand pit 10.17 miles south-east and the Tri-City Regional Port yard 10.94 miles south. A river port sits 3.68 miles west.

Madison County records 16 rows and ten of them are rail yards, which makes this a switching and transloading district rather than a line-haul corridor. The truck work that goes with it is short and repeated: between yards, terminals and the plants around them, many times a day.

Tank work is a large part of that given the terminals here. A tank barrel keeps its own record — if you have one to sell, tell us what it last carried and whether it has been cleaned. That is a normal question on this ground, not an awkward one.

So tank trucks and day cabs are the local shape, with ten Madison County rail yards close by and the Martin Marietta Bluff City Mine 4.33 miles north. That is a fact about this ground, 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.