We buy trucks in Potosi

This is the least reliable set of locations in the lane, and the honest thing is to lead with that rather than bury it. Three operations are filed to this town, and all three carry a location problem.

The first, Duffield Aggregate, has a county field and a city field that agree with each other and a coordinate that disagrees with both, putting it 21.37 miles from the middle of town. That is the shape of a coordinate error found elsewhere in this research and corrected — but it was corrected in Tennessee, where the state publishes a coordinate for every approved aggregate producer. Missouri publishes no register of approved sources at all, so there is nothing here to check it against. Which field is wrong is not established, and it is not guessed at.

The second, Leadwood Plant, is filed to this town while sitting 11.88 miles away in St Francois County. The town it names in its own title, Leadwood, is about three miles from its coordinates and in that other county. So the record contradicts itself, and eleven miles is under the threshold that would flag it automatically.

The third is a dimension-limestone operation with 7 employees under Central Stone Company, and the central cross-check flags its county too. Central Stone holds three operations across three Missouri counties — New London, Farmington and here.

Those defects are about where a record points, not about whether a machine exists or what it did. The employment is real: 9 people at Duffield, 4 at the Leadwood plant, 7 at the dimension-stone operation.

The road figures are real too, provided they are read as describing the coordinate rather than the town. Within ten miles of that coordinate there are 134 structures, five carrying a posting and two rated below legal loads, the nearest 9.65 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 14.9 US tons. St Francois County, which is where two of these three really sit, restricts 5 of 63 — 7.9 per cent against a state county rate of 12.7.

And the district reading holds regardless of which side of a county line a given pit is on. This is Old Lead Belt country, where Bonne Terre, Leadwood, Desloge, Elvins and Flat River worked galena from the 1860s until the 1970s. What is quarried now is the dolomite that hosted the ore. The ground was disturbed and served by haul roads built for a heavier industry, and a district that lost its main industry fifty years ago has civil-works demand that is programme-funded rather than growth-led, so the year runs flatter than a building market’s.

Whatever the record says about where a machine sat, the weight law it ran under is the same across Missouri.

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. Day cabs and road tractors for the runs out of the district. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. The nearest of the three sits 11.88 miles from the middle of town, and the Central Stone yard 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. Bringing it to us works too.

• 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.
• Your page says the records here are unreliable. Is that a problem for selling?Not at all. It is a problem for describing where a quarry is, which is our job rather than yours. What matters for a sale is the truck and its history, and you can tell us both.
• My machine worked in the next county, not this one.Very likely, and worth saying. Two of the three operations filed to this town are actually in St Francois County. The county line matters more than the postal address around here.
• 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 Washington County and the ones around it, St Francois and Iron included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a pit working out, 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. Around the Central Stone yard, and out across the Old Lead Belt, there is usually one sitting.