We buy trucks in Springfield

The crushed-stone operation attached to Springfield records 18 employees to the federal mine regulator and sits 5.42 miles from the middle of the city. It is coded as an underground mine, which matters more than the employment does.

The roads around it are about as easy as Missouri gets. Greene County holds Springfield, maintains 221 bridges of its own, and has two of them rated below legal loads — 0.9 per cent, last of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty structures. Not near the bottom. Last. The county owns a large network and simply keeps it open.

Twenty-five miles west that reverses completely. Lawrence County maintains 33 structures and restricts twelve of them — 36.4 per cent, fifth of the same 109. A forty-fold range across one county line. So the Springfield market itself imposes no route problem worth the name, while a load heading west enters one of the five most restricted county networks in the state.

Close in, the figures stay small. Within ten miles there are 309 structures, 39 posted for load and six rated below legal loads, one of them county-maintained and the nearest 4.60 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 15.9 US tons.

So a truck out of here has usually had an easy time of it — but the operator’s name will not tell you that, and this quarry is the case in point. The company running it holds two Missouri sites about seventy miles apart: this underground one in Greene County, which restricts 0.9 per cent of what it maintains, and a surface quarry at Carterville over in Jasper County, out in the old Tri-State mining district on a much denser network.

Those two sites face opposite road environments, and a machine’s history depends entirely on which end of the state it worked. The operator sets the specification; the site sets the duty. Which is why the question we ask is where a truck ran rather than who owned it.

The underground coding cuts the same way. A room-and-pillar mine runs at steady temperature and out of the weather, so a machine that stayed inside has had a materially different life from one that ran the public roads, and a seller should say which it was. It is the most useful single thing you can tell us about a machine off a site like this.

The rail here is a naming puzzle rather than a fact about trucks. Four yards are attached to Springfield and all four are under BNSF: Springfield, Springfield North, Springfield South and North Springfield. Springfield sits 1.85 miles from Springfield North and 1.79 from Springfield South, which is the spacing a named centre with two ends would produce. North Springfield sits 0.09 miles from Springfield North — about 460 feet — which is not. Whether that last pair is one yard recorded twice or two adjacent yards was not determined.

Those open roads still sit under the same statutory ceiling as the tight ones, and it carries a provision worth knowing.

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 off the through lanes. Box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. From a city this size 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. Bringing it to us is just as fine. Across Greene County and west into Lawrence County the same equipment comes up for sale for the same reasons.

• 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 it is the most useful single 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 public roads.
• It ran west of here rather than in town.Worth saying, because it is a different road network. Greene County restricts under one per cent of what it maintains and the county two doors west restricts over a third. Same truck, different 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. 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. Bringing it to us works too.
• How far out do you come?All of Greene County and the ones around it, Lawrence 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 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. Yards around the Radix Quarries workings usually have one waiting, and Greene County turns over its share.