We buy trucks in Orrick

MSHA records 16 employees at Missouri Rock Inc. The node’s coordinates lie 4.55 miles from the Census centroid of Orrick, the place the node list names, so the figures below describe the recorded point rather than the town centre.

The county is where this page has to start. Ray County restricts 29.0% of the county-maintained structures it looks after, which ranks 16th of the 109 Missouri counties with at least twenty such structures.

That is a high rate anywhere, and it is unusually high for a county this close to a metropolitan area. It means routing is a permanent condition of working here rather than an occasional inconvenience.

It also produces a coding result worth a section of its own, because in this county the two federal bridge fields disagree in the direction almost nobody expects.

That disagreement is the reason this research does not use the more obvious number. Item 41 records that a structure is coded posted for load; item 70 records whether it carries legal loads. They are independent codings rather than one being a subset of the other.

In Ray County the item-70 count exceeds the item-41 count — 29 against 27. The same holds in Saline County at 15 against 14 and Cooper County at 9 against 8. So counting posted signs does not merely overstate restriction in metropolitan counties; in rural ones it MISSES restrictions altogether.

Around this node the local split runs the other way and is worth reading with that in mind. Within ten miles the bridge file counts 132 structures, 35 coded posted on item 41 and 22 coded below legal loads on item 70. Of those 22, 13 are county-maintained and the nearest is 3.44 miles away.

The median operating rating of the item-41 group is 31.5 metric tonnes, which no loaded stone truck approaches, but the lowest genuinely restricted crossing is rated 9.9 metric tonnes and the lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is 11.7, about 12.9 US tons — barely over an empty tandem’s tare. So the restricted crossings here decide which way a load goes and how much of it goes that way.

Those crossings set one limit. The weight statute sets the other, 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 bottom ground. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around Missouri Rock Inc — sixteen people on the MSHA roll, 4.55 miles out from the town centroid — and across a Ray County that rates 29.0% of its own structures below legal loads, this bottom country 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 has been routed round rated crossings for years.That is the ordinary history here. Ray County rates 29.0% of what it maintains below legal loads and 13 of the 22 restricted crossings within ten miles of this pit are county-maintained, so routing rather than loading is usually what shaped the miles.
• It ran part-loaded most of its life.Likely, and worth mentioning. The lowest crossing here that still takes a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 12.9 US tons, barely over the tare of an empty tandem, so what came across it was a fraction of a legal load.
• 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 Ray County and the ones around it, Clay County and Lafayette 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 Missouri Rock Inc, and across Ray County, there is usually one sitting.