We buy trucks in Barnhart

Jefferson County lies immediately south of St Louis County on the Mississippi, and the operations here sit within twelve miles of one another in a corridor along Interstate 55 and the river. Two quarries are filed to this place: Barnhart Quarry at 32 employees, 1.27 miles from the middle of the place, and Antonia at 10, about four and a half miles out.

This is limestone and dolomite country on the northern edge of the Ozark uplift, and the market it serves is a metropolitan one of roughly 2.8 million people, reached by road, by river and by rail. A metropolitan aggregate market takes stone continuously rather than in a season, and the river gives the longest hauls a mode that is not a truck — so a road fleet here does short repeated deliveries into a dense network rather than long legs. No barge loading is claimed for any of these operations; what is established is the river, the interstate and the employment.

The road network is unusually open for all that traffic. Jefferson County restricts 4 of 181 county-maintained structures — 2.2 per cent, against a statewide county rate of 12.7.

That low figure sits next to a much larger one, which is the trap this part of the state sets. Within ten miles there are 253 structures. Fifty carry a posting. Five are rated below legal loads.

Only the second of those is a restriction on this trade. The median of the fifty is rated 52.2 metric tonnes, which no loaded stone truck comes near. Read the posted count instead and this corridor would look ten times more constrained than it is.

The five that matter are specific and mostly not close. Three are county-maintained and the nearest is 5.29 miles out. The lowest rating among them is 8.1 metric tonnes, below which nothing commercial crosses even empty, and the lowest that still admits a loaded truck is about 14.9 US tons — roughly 2.5 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare.

This corner is also where the Missouri research started, and two things about the state came out of it. It is the first state on file where a crushed-stone hauler gets any weight tolerance at all, because the 2,000 lb allowance is not tied to a commodity. And it is the first with no public register of approved aggregate sources, which is why nothing on any of these pages claims that a given quarry supplies state highway work.

That tolerance is worth setting out properly, because it is the one thing Missouri gives this trade that no other state on file does.

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.

Then subsection 6 does something none of the other states on file do for this trade. 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. Both texts are on the books, and how they work together is not something the research resolved.

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. That is not a quirk of Missouri drafting. 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.

One more thing separates Missouri from its neighbours: it prices an overload rather than stopping it. 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. What the section does not carry is a do-not-move rule. 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. Those are different risks, and over a few years they produce different loading habits and a differently worn truck.

RSMo §§ 304.180 and 304.240; 23 U.S.C. § 127. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond weight, the paperwork comes down to a single 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. Both are ordinary and neither one stops a sale.

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. Both limbs have to be met, not either one.

Both numbers are outliers, and they pull the same way. Eighty per cent is the highest threshold on file — 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.

The repair side leaves out more here than in any other state on file: inflatable safety restraints, tires, sound systems, damage from hail, and sales tax on parts and materials. 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. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule was last checked.

All of that is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone. Day cabs and road tractors off the Interstate 55 lanes. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, car haulers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. The quarry here sits 1.27 miles from the middle of the place, and Jefferson County turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. This close to the metro none of the ways of collecting is unusual — we can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all.

• 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.
• Does the emissions programme apply to my truck?No. Jefferson County is one of the four the programme covers, but it stops at 8,500 lb gross vehicle weight rating and every truck on this page is rated well above that. The area is inside it; the trade is not.
• There are posted signs all over this county.There are, and almost none of them is a limit for a loaded truck. Fifty crossings within ten miles carry a posting and five are actually rated below legal loads. It is the second number that decides a route.
• 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. Neither one stops a sale.
• Do you come out?Yes, and it is easy from here. We can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow with no visit at all.
• How far out do you come?All of Jefferson County and the ones around it, St Louis and Ste Genevieve included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a contract finishing, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A DOT physical that didn’t go the way it used to. A partnership splitting and the equipment with it. A truck that stopped earning and has been sitting since, where every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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. Yards along the Jefferson County stretch of the river usually have one waiting, and the Antonia pit 4.71 miles out has its share.