We buy trucks in Remington

The node attached to Remington is a rail facility whose recorded name ends in “lift”, and that word is doing real work. A lift names an intermodal function: containers or trailers transferring between rail and road. It is one of the few rail rows in this research where the record itself tells you there is truck traffic, rather than leaving it to be inferred.

The operator on the row is the Toledo, Peoria & Western Railway, and the coordinate lies 1.76 miles from the town centroid, in Jasper County. It falls outside any incorporated place, with this town simply the nearest one holding a page.

That much the row supports. The rest of it does not: what actually moves through the Toledo, Peoria & Western facility could not be determined from any source read for this research, so a container count or a commodity mix is not something this page will offer.

The 75 miles of local drayage credited to the row is not a measurement of this site either — it is a constant applied to every rail row and flagged as estimated. And the 1.76 miles is measured to the mean of a track polyline rather than to a surveyed gate, as all 2,459 rail rows in this research are.

What is exact is the weight rule on the Jasper County roads either side of it, and Indiana keys that rule to the road rather than to the cargo.

Gross weight is 80,000 lb, single axles 20,000 and tandems 34,000 on the heavy-duty network the state designates. Off that network the gross falls to 73,280 lb, single axles to 18,000, and a tandem assembly is capped at 16,000 lb for each of its axles — 32,000 for the pair. A truck on an undesignated county road therefore starts 6,720 lb below the federal gross.

For intermodal work that pairing matters more than usual, because a container is loaded to a weight decided somewhere else entirely and then handed to a truck that has to be legal on the road it is actually standing on. Which Jasper County roads carry a heavy-duty designation was not established, and no consolidated list of local designations was found.

One more limit follows the load rather than the road: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty, which a dense load in a container reaches on a short wheelbase rather than spread down a trailer.

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 one sentence: we need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one 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 and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, and a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass it.

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, flatbeds and dump trucks, aggregate haulers, farm trucks and grain hauls, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Day cabs earn a particular mention around an intermodal lift. Container work is a day-cab trade, and a tractor that has spent its life pulling chassis 1.76 miles to the trackwork and back is a machine we see a lot of.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. The shops and small yards in town and the unincorporated Jasper County ground where the trackwork runs 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 mileage is low but it is worn out.That is the intermodal pattern exactly. Short runs to the lift and back, a great deal of coupling and shunting, and hours and brake cycles well ahead of the odometer. We read the truck rather than the dash.
• Do you actually come to Remington?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing at the trackwork 1.76 miles out. All of Jasper County either way. 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.

Those answers matter because the reason for the call is usually not the truck. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling contract ending, which in container work can happen with very little notice. A truck standing beside a shop, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Between the town and the Toledo, Peoria & Western trackwork 1.76 miles out, and along the Jasper County roads either side, 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. That’s what we’re here for.