Missouri carries freight on its rivers and a lot of stone.
A Peterbilt day cab out of St. Louis, a Mack Granite off a Viburnum haul, a Volvo sleeper running west or a GMC dually out of Springfield are handled the same way: send us photos and the particulars, we come back with an offer, and if you like it we'll come to you, buy it remotely, or you can bring it to us.
Missouri’s trucking industry is sitting at the geographic center of the U.S. with major interstate crossings at I-70 and I-44 making it a critical freight hub.
One ceiling, and two thousand pounds that name no commodity
Whatever leaves by rail avoids all of that; what goes by road runs under the same ceiling as everything else in the state. Missouri sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb, and it keeps the federal ceiling in place by providing that nothing in the section allows a load heavier than Title 23 of the United States Code does. Any vehicle or combination running on highways other than the interstate system may go over the single-axle, tandem-axle and gross limits by up to two thousand pounds — and that allowance names no commodity at all. Everywhere else the relief is written for somebody in particular. Tennessee’s ten per cent names sand, coal, clay, shale and phosphate, and leaves crushed stone out. Kentucky’s names crushed stone first. Alabama gives nobody anything. Missouri gives everybody two thousand pounds once you are off the interstate, which at 80,000 lb is about two and a half per cent. One thing in that section is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to tidy it up. Subsection 6 says the allowance may be taken against the gross limit. Subsection 3’s own 80,000 lb cap is written as subject to subsections 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, and it does not name subsection 6. The commodity allowances Missouri does write are all built the same way and all stop in the same place. Grain and grain co-products may run ten per cent over during harvest; milk and livestock may reach 85,500 lb; local log trucks reach 109,600 lb. Every one of them applies only on highways other than the interstate system. Title 23 caps the Interstate System at 80,000 lb and no state can raise it, so any state allowance above 80,000 lb has to live off the interstate by construction. The state route is the loaded road and the interstate is the empty one. The fine runs by the pound on a rising scale — two cents for each pound of the first five hundred, five cents to a thousand, ten cents above that. Tennessee makes it separately unlawful to move an overloaded truck until the load comes off, so an overweight truck there stops where it stands. Missouri lets it carry on and sends a bill.
RSMo §§ 304.180 and 304.240; 23 U.S.C. § 127.
Missouri’s salvage rule is worth a minute because it reaches almost nothing in the stock we buy. A vehicle is branded salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds eighty per cent of the fair market value immediately before the damage, and where the damage happened no more than six years after the manufacturer’s model year designation. Eighty per cent is the higher threshold — Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee all brand at seventy-five. Six model years is the shortest age window found anywhere; Arkansas runs seven and Tennessee ten. Past that window the Missouri rule does not reach a vehicle at all, however badly it was damaged. For a used commercial truck the age limb is nearly always the operative one and the percentage nearly never is. Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation and nothing else. Two states can share a threshold and still be adding up different repair bills. Where the brand does land, Missouri applies it on the way out rather than on the way in. A salvage vehicle is retitled only after an examination recorded on Form 551, carried out by an inspector of the Missouri State Highway Patrol or by the St. Louis city or county auto theft unit, and that certificate runs out six months from the date of inspection. The title issued afterwards carries the words PRIOR SALVAGE. Minnesota uses the same two words for the opposite end of the process, branding on acquisition; the same phrase means an incoming obligation in one state and an outgoing designation in the other.
RSMo § 301.010; Missouri Department of Revenue Form 551.