We buy trucks in Jasper

MSHA records 4 employees at the Jasper Quarry, which the node list carries under Mulberry Limestone Quarry Co.

What this page will not do is tell you what the roads immediately around that pit are like, and the reason is worth saying out loud rather than quietly leaving the numbers off. The row carries no usable coordinate.

The value it does carry is shared by twelve rows spanning four node types and twelve different Missouri counties — Christian, Howell, Jasper, Jefferson, Phelps, Ste Genevieve, Taney, Texas, Webster and Wright, with Franklin appearing twice. It is the largest shared-coordinate group in the whole 10,745-row node list.

Twelve operations in twelve counties cannot occupy one point, so the value is a default rather than a location — and the point itself lies in Phelps County beside Doolittle and Rolla, most of the way across the state from here. So there is no ten-mile bridge count on this page, no nearest-posting distance and no commercial floor. The county figures are what we have, and we are labelling them as such.

Those county figures are better than the state’s, and by some distance. Across Jasper County, 8 of the 213 structures the county maintains are coded below legal loads on NBI item 70 — 3.8%, against 12.7% across Missouri’s counties — and 9 are coded posted on item 41.

There is a reason for that, and it is older than the quarry. Jasper County and Newton County are the Missouri part of the Tri-State lead and zinc district, which worked from the 1850s until the 1950s across the corner where Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma meet, and left the largest concentration of mine waste in the region.

The ground was disturbed long before any crushed-stone operation arrived, and it is already served by rail and haul roads built for a heavier industry. So the network here is denser than a rural county rate on its own would suggest: between 253 and 313 structures inside ten miles of the district’s other rows, in a county that restricts 3.8 per cent of what it maintains.

The demand is a different shape too. A district under long-running remediation has civil works that are programme-funded rather than growth-led, which makes the year flatter than a subdivision market’s. No remediation contract or programme is being asserted here — it is the shape of the market, not a schedule. And the Kansas and Oklahoma lines are close enough to matter; neither state’s rules were researched for this page.

So much for the county. Whatever the road turns out to be, the statute sets the outer limit, and Missouri writes it in one place.

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. Farm trucks and grain hauls off the country around it. 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 Jasper Quarry — four people on the MSHA roll, carried in the node list under Mulberry Limestone Quarry Co — and across Jasper County and Newton County toward Joplin and Webb City, this corner turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. 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 — and you’re welcome to bring it to us if that suits you better.

• 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.
• It hauled stone rather than ore.That is what there is to haul now. The lead and zinc went in the 1950s; what the district leaves behind is disturbed ground, a dense road network and crushed-stone work on top of it.
• Your record of where the pit is looks wrong.It is, and we would rather say so. The coordinate on that row is a default shared with eleven others in eleven other counties, which is why this page quotes Jasper County figures and no bridge distances of its own. It changes nothing about buying your 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, or come to you and tow it. We can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow with no visit at all, and you’re welcome to drive it to us if that suits you better.
• How far out do you come?All of Jasper County and the ones around it, Newton County and Barton 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 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. Around the Jasper Quarry, and across the Tri-State ground from Joplin to Webb City, there is usually one sitting. On a county network that restricts 3.8% of what it maintains, getting it out is rarely the hard part.