We buy trucks in Hammond

Four rail-yard rows are attached to Hammond. Three belong to the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad — Gibson at 0.79 miles from the city centre, Michigan Ave at 2.43 and Gibson Transfer at 3.12 — and the fourth, at 1.01 miles, to CSX Transportation.

The Gibson pair are worth reading rather than counting. They sit 2.55 miles apart under the same carrier, which looks at first like the same duplicate-row problem that turns up elsewhere in this county. It is not. The added token names a function instead of repeating the name with a carrier tag: a classification yard and the transfer facility beside it are two facilities at one site, and both are real.

Those are the two readings this dataset supports, and telling them apart takes the name rather than the distance. It is the difference between a district with two yards in it and a district with one yard written down twice.

That care with names is needed on the addresses too. Three of these four rows sit inside a municipality other than the one they are attached to. The row called East Chicago falls inside East Chicago, which has a page of its own; Michigan Ave falls inside East Chicago as well, and carries a street name that identifies neither the city it is filed under nor the city containing it; Gibson Transfer is attached by nearest-place fallback rather than by falling inside Hammond at all.

Three Indiana Calumet yard rows are filed that way, alongside fourteen more on the Illinois side of the same metropolitan area. A state line runs close by, and the yards do not care about it.

None of which tells you what moves through them — that could not be determined from any source read, at any of the four. So the page says what it has: four yards, two carriers, one dense rail district that spills across three city lines and a state one. What decides what a truck may carry across all of it is state law.

Those state rules are keyed to the road rather than the cargo, which is a fifth structure among the states on file.

Indiana sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, single axles at 20,000 and tandems at 34,000, on the heavy-duty network the state highway agency designates. Off that network gross falls to 73,280 lb and tandems fall from 34,000 to 16,000, more than half. Which roads carry the designation was not determined for any row in this batch.

Beyond the state figure, local authorities may impose lesser limits on their own roads and bridges, and seasonal restrictions are administered by county and municipal highway departments rather than as a single state season. In a district where three city lines meet inside a few miles, that is a question to ask locally rather than assume.

One further limit applies to dense loads wherever they run: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty. Steel and stone reach it on a short deck length, so tyre specification can decide legality on a yard run and not merely wear.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-1; local limits under § 9-20-1-4 and § 9-20-7-2. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.

Indiana brands a vehicle salvage where repair to a roadworthy state would cost more than 70 per cent of its fair market value immediately before the damage, and the statute names semitrailers explicitly, so a trailer can carry a brand independently of the tractor. Rebuilding requires a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts used and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, which a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass.

Ind. Code § 9-22-3-3 and § 9-22-3. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, tankers, rollbacks, car haulers, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Lake County thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The Gibson yards, the Michigan Ave end of town and the run to the state line are where most of it turns up.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
• The truck is titled in Illinois but parked here.That is common two miles from a state line and it is not a problem. The paperwork follows where it is titled, not where it is standing.
• It ran short yard work, not highway.Common enough round Lake County and the Gibson Transfer end of town. Then hours and cycles tell you more than the odometer does. Brakes, clutch and suspension go first on that kind of work. Tell us what it did and we will ask about the right things.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended when work moved across the line. A truck sitting on a lot since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Lake County, the Gibson Transfer end of it and the runs west, there is usually one waiting.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, 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.