We buy trucks in Moberly

The MOBERLY rail yard is recorded with operator Norfolk Southern, and its coordinate lies 0.83 miles from the centroid of Moberly — inside the place, rather than matched to it from outside. It is the only rail-yard row attached to this town in the whole node list.

The point was found within the town’s own radius rather than reached for from a list of nearby names, so which town this yard belongs to is not in doubt even though the exact position is soft.

Soft, because the coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point, and all 2,459 rail-yard rows in this survey are derived the same way. A yard is a long thing, and the mean of its track is a point in the middle of something that is not a point.

What could not be determined is what moves through it. No source read for this work carried the commodities handled at MOBERLY, and we are not going to guess at a yard’s traffic to make a page read better.

Those limits are worth stating plainly, because a page that is confident about the wrong things is worse than one that is clear about what it does not know.

The 75-mile radius carried against this row is not a measured catchment for Randolph County. It is a slice-wide constant applied to every rail-yard row in the survey and flagged as estimated, so it describes how far the research reached rather than how far this yard’s traffic goes.

On the rules there is no ambiguity at all. Missouri’s Gateway Vehicle Inspection Program reaches only St Louis City, St Louis County, St Charles County and Jefferson County. Randolph County is outside it, so nothing registered here faces an emissions inspection on registration.

That would change nothing for this trade in any case, because the programme applies only to vehicles rated 8,500 lb gross vehicle weight or less and every vehicle we handle is rated far above it. Missouri has also not adopted the Advanced Clean Trucks rule.

Beyond the emissions line, the weight statute is the rule that actually reaches a truck this size, 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. Day cabs and road tractors off the yard lanes. Flatbeds, rollbacks, end dumps and lowboys. Dump trucks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around the MOBERLY yard — Norfolk Southern, 0.83 miles from the town centroid and inside the place — and across Randolph County, this part of north Missouri 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 ran out of a rail yard rather than a pit.Makes no difference to us. We buy the drayage and yard equipment on the same terms as anything else, and we do not need to know what the yard handled to make you an offer — which is just as well, because for MOBERLY nobody could tell us.
• Does the St Louis emissions programme affect it?No. The Gateway Vehicle Inspection Program covers four eastern jurisdictions and Randolph County is not among them, and in any case it stops at a gross vehicle weight rating of 8,500 lb.
• 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 Randolph County and the ones around it, Macon County and Howard 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. That’s what we’re here for. Around the MOBERLY yard, 0.83 miles across town, and through Randolph County, there is usually one sitting.