We buy trucks in Neosho

Jasper and Newton counties 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. It left the largest concentration of mine waste in the region, up around Joplin and Webb City.

What it also left is road. Ground already disturbed and already served by rail and haul roads built for a heavier industry ends up denser than the county accounts suggest. There are 137 structures within ten miles of the quarry here, in a county that restricts 11 of 160 county-maintained structures — 6.9 per cent, comfortably under the statewide 12.7.

The other consequence is about the shape of the year. A district under long-running remediation has civil-works demand that is programme-funded rather than growth-led, so the work runs flatter across a year than a building market’s. No remediation contract is claimed for any operation here.

That corner is the thing to hold in mind about a truck sold here. Kansas and Oklahoma are both within fifteen miles, and neither state’s rules were researched for this page — so everything below about weight and title is Missouri only and should not be read as describing either neighbour.

It matters for what a machine has been through, too. A truck working out of Neosho may have spent much of its life under three different sets of state rules without ever going far from home, and the record does not separate them. You will know which side of the lines the work was on.

Locally the crossings are moderate. Twelve of the 137 structures are rated below legal loads, six of them county-maintained, the nearest 3.93 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 16.9 US tons, which allows roughly 4.3 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare.

The other record filed here is a National Guard training site, and it is thin: acreage, strength and mission were all left unestablished, so nothing is claimed about it beyond its being in this county.

Because the lines are that close, it is worth being exact that what follows is Missouri law and nothing else.

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 Camp Crowder end of town, and across Newton County, 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.

• 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.
• Do you buy across the state lines?Yes. Kansas and Oklahoma are both within fifteen miles of here and we buy in all three. We have not researched either of those states’ rules for this page, so nothing here should be read as describing them.
• It worked on the Kansas side as much as here.Common around this corner, and worth telling us. A truck can spend its life under three sets of state rules without going far from home, and the paperwork does not separate them.
• 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 Newton County and the ones around it, Jasper County and McDonald County included, and over both state lines. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a contract ending, 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. Across Newton County and Jasper County there is usually one sitting.