We buy trucks in Greenwood

Jackson County maintains 89 bridges of its own and one of them is rated below legal loads — 1.1 per cent, 106th of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty structures. Read straight, that is one of the easiest road networks in the state.

It says nothing of the kind. A large city maintains its own bridges and those are coded to the city rather than the county, so they never enter the county figure. The county next door but one maintains 375 against this county’s 89, and it is the rural one.

The quarry here records 28 employees, 0.87 miles from the middle of town, and its county field disagrees with its own coordinates while the city field agrees with them — so the county figure on this page is computed from the coordinate rather than from the record.

That count is the one worth reading. Within ten miles there are 264 structures, 39 carrying a posting and six rated below legal loads, three of them county-maintained, the nearest 5.17 miles out.

Six is a real figure and it is six times the county’s own count, in a radius that covers a fraction of the county. The median posted crossing here is rated 41.4 metric tonnes, above what a fully legal truck weighs, so the posted count again overstates. The lowest that binds admits about 16.9 US tons.

The wider point is the one this lane has made repeatedly, and this town is a clean example. "A Kansas City truck" is not a description of a road history. The market spans a county that restricts about one per cent of what it owns and another, forty miles off across the river, that restricts twenty-nine — and the river between them has few crossings.

So the question worth asking a seller is which part of the metro a machine worked, not whether it worked the metro.

With so little binding, what limits a load here is mostly 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, 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 metro lanes. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, car haulers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around the Greenwood Quarry, and across Jackson County and Lafayette County, this side of the metro 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.
• The county says almost none of its bridges are restricted.The county figure understates it badly. A large city maintains its own bridges and those are coded to the city, so they never enter the county count. Six crossings inside ten miles of here are rated below legal loads.
• It worked north of the river rather than here.Worth saying. This county restricts about one per cent of what it owns and Ray County across the water restricts twenty-nine. Same market, very different road history.
• 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 Jackson County and the ones around it, Lafayette County and Johnson 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. Across Jackson County and Lafayette County there is usually one sitting.