We buy trucks in Randolph

The Randolph Deep Mine records 103 employees underground. That puts it joint third among the 99 underground operations in this research — level with a Georgia mine and behind two in Kentucky — and 28th of 2,122 operations overall by employment. The median operation in the same data employs about ten people.

It also sits on the densest road network measured anywhere in this work: 737 structures within ten miles, in a circle that crosses the state line and picks up 95 more from the Kansas file for 832 in total. The median operation in this data sees under 200.

An operation of that size runs a written specification, a maintenance department and a replacement cycle, so its machines leave with records. And because it is underground, the single most useful thing a seller can say is whether a given machine worked inside or on the road. At the same age those are materially different lives — a room-and-pillar mine runs at steady temperature and out of the weather.

That mine is not on its own. Four underground operations lie within twenty-five miles of one another here — 103 people at Randolph, 23 at Liberty, 23 at Mosby and 22 at Kingsville over in Johnson County, 171 underground between them. Missouri holds seven underground operations in this research and four are in this corner.

It is a district rather than a quirk of the record. Kansas City sits on flat-lying Pennsylvanian limestones that are thick, uniform and easy to enter from a bluff face, so room-and-pillar mining wins out over stripping the overburden off — and the mined-out rooms get a second life as conditioned warehouse space. An operation whose voids have a use afterwards is not working to exhaustion the way a surface pit is, so its production and its fleet run steadier over a longer horizon.

A sand operation sits here too, 14 employees under Holliday Sand & Gravel — a company that also turns up four times in the Oklahoma production returns, so it is a two-state operator visible through two entirely different kinds of record.

The roads are the Kansas City pattern. Twenty-nine structures within ten miles are rated below legal loads against 138 carrying a posting, only three of them county-maintained, the nearest 2.79 miles out. The lowest that admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 18.8 US tons. Clay County restricts 18 of 72 — a quarter of what it maintains — while Jackson County across the river restricts 1.1 per cent, so a truck’s road history here depends entirely on which side of the water it worked.

Those crossings are the local limit; the statutory ceiling is the same on both sides of the river.

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 and the sand. Day cabs and road tractors for the runs into the metro. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around the Holliday Sand plant, and across Clay County, this corner turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. This close to the metro none of the ways of collecting is unusual — 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.
• Mine worked underground. Does that count against it?The opposite, usually, and here it is the single most useful thing you can tell us. A room-and-pillar mine runs at steady temperature and out of the weather, so a machine that stayed inside has had a very different life from one that ran the roads.
• It worked south of the river rather than here.Worth saying. Clay County restricts a quarter of what it maintains and Jackson County across the water restricts about one per cent, and there are few crossings between them. Same market, very different road history.
• 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, and it is easy from here. 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 Clay County and the ones around it, Jackson County and Ray County included, and over into Kansas. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a shift going, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A DOT physical that didn’t go the way it used to. 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 Deep Mine, and across Clay County, there is usually one sitting.