We buy trucks in Otterville

Otterville Quarry records 5 employees, 1.91 miles from the middle of Otterville. Within ten miles of it the national bridge file counts 98 structures, and two different columns each put ten of them under a restriction.

They are not the same ten, and that is the whole difficulty with reading Missouri’s bridge data. One column says a structure is posted for load. The other says it will not carry legal loads. Across the state the first flags 3,196 of 24,647 structures and the second 2,206, and only about three in five of the posted ones also fail the load test.

So the two are independent codings rather than one sitting inside the other. In Cooper County the load test actually finds more than the posting column does, nine against eight, and the same inversion turns up in Ray County at 29 against 27 and in Saline County at 15 against 14. The posting column does not merely overstate restriction in the cities; in country like this it misses some.

We read the load test, because it is the column that asks the question a loaded truck asks. Across Cooper County 9 of 124 county-maintained structures fail it, against a Missouri county-maintained rate roughly half again as high. By that measure this is easier ground than most of the state.

Those county figures average a whole county, so the ten-mile circle is the one that describes a haul. Of the ten crossings inside it that fail the load test, nine are Cooper County’s own and the nearest is 2.71 miles out.

The lowest operating rating among them is 4.5 metric tonnes, well under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump. Nothing commercial crosses that one in either direction, loaded or not.

The lowest that does admit a commercial vehicle is rated 14.4 tonnes, about 15.9 US tons. Over the tare that leaves roughly 3.4 tonnes of stone, against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. Below 11.0 tonnes nothing commercial crosses at all; between 11.0 and 36.3 it crosses part loaded; at or above 36.3 a legal load goes over whole.

Read that floor as an upper bound rather than a promise. It is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at most nodes measured this way a tighter crossing lies somewhere between ten miles and twenty. A truck working out of a pit like this one has spent its life picking routes around those numbers, and that is worth saying out loud when you come to sell it.

Those crossings are the local limit. The ceiling above them is the state’s, and Missouri writes it in a single section.

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 applies only on highways other than the interstate system. That is not a quirk of drafting: Title 23 caps the Interstate System at 80,000 lb and no state can raise it, so any allowance above that 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, with impoundment until the fines are paid also on the table. 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. Grain trucks and farm trucks off the Cooper County bottoms. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Across Cooper County and Pettis County this 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, or come to you and tow it. We can also 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.
• Why do you read one bridge column and not the other?Because they measure different things. In Cooper County the load-test column finds more restricted crossings than the posting column does, nine against eight, so taking the postings alone would undercount what a loaded truck meets.
• It came off a five-man pit rather than a fleet.Then say so. An operation that size runs what it has, so the machine has usually had one duty for a long time rather than several duties briefly.
• 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 Cooper County and the ones around it, Pettis County and Morgan County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a season 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 Cooper County and Pettis County there is usually one sitting.