We buy trucks in Maryland Heights

The Champ Quarry sits 1.69 miles from the middle of Maryland Heights and records 50 employees to the federal mine regulator. That is the whole of the local industrial record we hold for this city, and saying so is better than padding it out.

The number worth your time here is not the quarry. It is the roads around it — and it is worth your time because reading it the obvious way gives exactly the wrong answer.

Within ten miles there are 579 bridges. 112 of them are coded as posted for load. Eight are rated below legal loads. Those two counts measure different things, and only the second one is a restriction on this trade: the median crossing in that group of 112 is rated at 57.6 metric tonnes, which no loaded stone truck comes near.

That gap between the two counts is wider in this county than anywhere else in Missouri. 157 of the county’s 187 county-maintained structures are coded posted for load — 84.0 per cent, first of the 109 counties that maintain at least twenty. Seven of them 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 operating rating of those 157 is 72.0 metric tonnes, about 79 US tons. Publishing the first figure would have described this county as the hardest place in the state to move a loaded truck when it is among the easiest.

It does not correct to a rule of thumb, either. About a fifth of Jefferson County’s posted structures also fail on load, against three quarters to all of them down at Cape Girardeau. The gap is geographic rather than uniform, so there is no statewide factor to apply, and the count that means anything is the one measured within ten miles of where a truck actually works.

Here that count is eight. Three are county-maintained and the nearest is 0.03 miles out. The lowest of them that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 25.8 US tons, which takes a tandem dump across part loaded rather than whole.

Those local limits are one half of what a loaded truck runs up against; the statutory ceiling is the other.

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. Box trucks and straight trucks off the warehousing. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, 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. 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. Bringing it to us is just as fine. Around the Champ Quarry and the industrial edge of St Louis County the same equipment turns over steadily.

• 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.
• Does the emissions programme apply to my truck?No. Maryland Heights is inside the four jurisdictions Missouri’s programme covers, but the programme stops at 8,500 lb gross vehicle weight rating and every truck on this page is rated well above that. The area is inside it; the trade is not.
• All those posted bridges near me — are they a problem?Almost none of them. Posted for load and rated below legal loads are two different codes, and in this county 84 per cent carry the first while under 4 per cent carry the second. The eight that matter are the ones this page counts.
• 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 counties around it. 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. Yards along the St Louis County side usually have one sitting, and the Champ Quarry end of town has its share.