We buy trucks in Cape Girardeau

The Lone Star Quarry & Mill is a surface operation working cement, operated by Buzzi Unicem USA, and it reports 180 employees to the federal mine regulator. That is a large workforce by the standards of this data, where the median operation employs fewer than ten people.

Its operator is the widest-spread company in the whole dataset. Buzzi holds nine sites across six states, three of them in Missouri, and no other single operator reaches as far. What that buys a seller is predictability: an operation on that scale runs a written specification, a maintenance department and a replacement cycle, so its machines tend to leave with records attached.

Cape Girardeau and Ste Genevieve counties face the Mississippi across the Illinois line, and the limestone that outcrops along it has been quarried and shipped by water since the eighteenth century. That is the older half of the industry here, and it still shapes the newer half.

Which is where cement and sand stop being interchangeable. Missouri holds five cement plants in this dataset and six industrial-sand rows, including a frac-sand-associated operator up at Pevely. So a pneumatic tanker sold in eastern Missouri could have carried either one, and the two are not the same duty: proppant is selected for hardness and crush resistance, and it wears a tank, a blower, the product lines and the aeration pads faster than cement does.

Which it carried is a genuinely open question here rather than a formality, and nothing in the record answers it. You will know, and it is worth telling us.

The river cuts the other way on mileage. A quarry with water access has a mode a landlocked one does not: the longest hauls leave by barge and the truck fleet does short local delivery. So employment and tonnage stop predicting truck mileage, and a big operation here may put fewer road miles on a truck than a small inland one does. No barge loading is claimed for any operation on this page — what is established is the employment, the river and the location.

The rail is a single row. The Cape Girardeau yard sits 2.31 miles from the middle of town under BNSF, inside the place, and it is the only rail yard attached to the city. One oddity is on the record and unresolved: a second row carrying this town’s name sits 59.2 miles away under the same carrier, attached to Ste Genevieve. At that separation the two are not one facility, and which name is wrong was not determined.

Those barge legs are the part of the work that never meets a weight limit; everything that goes by road 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. Pneumatic tankers off the cement and the sand. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. Down this end of the state the straightest route is often that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody making the drive at all. We can also come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it, and bringing it to us stays on the table if you are heading that way. Around the Lone Star Quarry and up the river towards Ste Genevieve, the same equipment turns over year on year.

• 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.
• My tanker hauled frac sand rather than cement.Then it has worked harder than a cement tank — sand is selected for hardness and it goes through the tank, blower, product lines and aeration pads faster. We would like to know the history. It does not change whether we buy it.
• Most of our tonnage goes out by barge. Does that matter?It matters to what the truck has been through, and usually in your favour. Where the long hauls leave by water the road fleet is doing short local runs, so the mileage on a machine here can be a lot lower than the size of the operation would suggest.
• 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.
• Will you really come out this far?We will, and often we do not need to. We can buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting, or come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it. Bringing it to us works too.
• How far out do you come?All of this county and the ones around it, up as far as Ste Genevieve and out past the Lone Star workings. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a plant cutting a shift, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. 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 Buzzi Unicem end of the river usually have one waiting, and the Lone Star Quarry has its share.