We buy trucks in Chesterfield

One record is filed to this town: a flour mill under the Grain Craft name, its coordinate reverse-geocoding to St Louis County. Site-level capacity, throughput and how the product moves were not established from anything read for this work.

That is not an oversight peculiar to this town. The operator publishes a corporate directory stub rather than a page per site, and the same has held for mill operations across six states in this research — it is predictable enough that it was written down as a prediction and then kept coming true.

So no tonnage, no shipping mode and no employment is claimed here. There is no quarry filed to this town either, and therefore no ten-mile bridge survey, and none is borrowed from a neighbour.

Those county figures are worth setting out because they are the most misleading in the state. St Louis County codes 157 of its 187 county-maintained structures as posted for load — 84.0 per cent, first of the 109 counties that maintain at least twenty.

Seven are rated below legal loads: 3.7 per cent, which ranks 94th of the same 109. So one county is either the most restricted road network in Missouri or one of the least, depending entirely on which column gets read.

The median of those 157 is rated 72.0 metric tonnes, about 79 US tons, which no loaded truck on this page approaches. Publishing the first figure would describe this county as the hardest place in the state to move a load when it is among the easiest.

The other thing the location settles is a question we get asked constantly. This county is one of the four inside Missouri’s emissions programme — but that programme stops at 8,500 lb gross vehicle weight rating, and every truck on this page is rated well above it. The area is inside; the trade is not.

With so little actually binding, what limits a load here is the statute.

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 and inspection, 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, and a thin record changes none of it. Box trucks and straight trucks off the metro work. Day cabs and road tractors off the freight lanes. Dump trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, car haulers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Across St Louis County and St Charles County the same machines come up for sale for the same reasons.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. This close in 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.
• Do I need an emissions certificate for it?No. This 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. Nobody should be asking you for one.
• Your page is thinner than the others. Why?Because the research on this town is thinner, and padding it out would mean inventing things. The Grain Craft mill is the one record we hold here and there is no bridge survey, so we have told you what we have.
• 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 St Louis County and the ones around it, Franklin County and Jefferson County 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. Around the Grain Craft mill, and across St Louis County and Franklin County, there is usually one sitting.