We buy trucks in Hannibal

Continental Cement runs a cement operation here with 141 employees, and it is coded underground rather than surface — the limestone it burns comes from workings beneath the plant rather than from an open pit.

That is a genuine regional pattern rather than a one-off. Of all the cement and stone operations in this research, nine are underground and three of those are in Missouri: this one, Sugar Creek at 123 employees, and Festus. The eastern Missouri limestone belt gets worked from underneath in several places, and two of the three are cement plants taking their stone that way.

It changes who is allowed on site and how. Underground operations and their surface areas fall under a different federal training regime from the surface quarries around them, so a delivery driver going into one is under a different set of rules from the one going into a pit down the road.

That cement is one of two things a pneumatic tanker in eastern Missouri might have hauled, and the two are not the same duty. Missouri holds five cement plants and six industrial-sand operations, including a frac-sand-associated operator at Pevely.

Proppant is selected for hardness and crush resistance, and it wears a tank, the blower, the product lines and the aeration pads faster than cement does. Which one a tank carried is a live question here rather than a formality, and nothing in the record answers it. You will know, and it is worth telling us.

The crushed-stone operation attached to this city records 16 employees, and its coordinates are 11.48 miles out — far enough that it is really working the county rather than the town. Within ten miles of it there are 89 structures and nine are rated below legal loads, every one of them county-maintained, the nearest 1.60 miles away. The lowest that still takes a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 13.9 US tons. Ralls County restricts 12 of 58, against a state county rate of 12.7 per cent.

The rail here is a single row and its name is not much use. The yard sits 1.50 miles from the middle of town under Norfolk Southern, and it is called Outer — a generic railroad term for a yard on the outer edge of a terminal. It names a position relative to something else rather than a facility, so it cannot be resolved without knowing the terminal it sits outside of.

Those crossings are the local limit; the statutory ceiling is the same across 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.

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. 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. Around the Continental Cement workings, and across Ralls County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. None of the ways of collecting is unusual 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 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.
• My tanker hauled cement.Then say so, because around here that is a real question rather than a formality. A tank that carried frac sand has had a harder life than one that carried cement — sand goes through the tank, blower, lines and pads faster. It does not change whether we buy it.
• It ran into an underground plant.Worth mentioning. Those sites run under a different federal training regime from the surface pits, and a machine that spent its time inside one has had a different life from a road truck.
• 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. 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 Marion County and Ralls County and the ones around them, and over the river into Illinois. 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 around the Huntington Plant usually have one sitting, and Ralls County turns over its share.