We buy trucks in St. Joseph

What we hold on St. Joseph is thin, and saying so first is better than dressing it up. Four records, none of them detailed, and no crushed-stone operation among them.

LifeLine Foods is carried in our data as a flour mill and is actually a corn processing operation, in Buchanan County on the Missouri River. Site-level capacity, throughput and shipping mode were not established from any source read for this work. Two military sites sit in the same county — the Rosecrans air facility and an Army Reserve centre — and for both of them acreage, strength and mission were not established either. They are recorded as thin, and they stay thin here.

The rail is a single row: the St. Joseph yard, under BNSF, 2.79 miles from the middle of the city and inside the place. It is the only rail yard attached to St Joseph.

Because no quarry is attached to this city, we hold no ten-mile bridge survey for it, and we are not going to borrow a neighbouring town’s and present it as this one’s. Absence of a measurement is not a measurement.

So the useful material for St. Joseph is Missouri law, and Missouri has one rule that no other state on file has. It keys legal length to how far you are from a highway system, measured in air miles on a published colour-coded route map.

More than ten air miles out from the Interstate or Designated system, a tractor-semitrailer may run 60 feet overall and a truck-trailer combination 65. Inside that distance the figures are 53 and 55. Eleven batches of research across a dozen states turned up no other state regulating length that way, and it is the sort of rule that quietly decides what a local operator bought in the first place rather than what happened to any one truck afterwards.

The other Missouri oddity is seasonal, and it runs backwards from everyone else’s. Every other seasonal restriction on file protects pavement from the spring thaw. Missouri’s restricts oversize travel for tourist traffic instead: Lake of the Ozarks from 25 May through Labor Day, and the Branson area within ten miles from 1 May to 2 November, with no Saturday or Sunday running on the affected routes. That takes two days in seven out for half the year, in summer rather than in spring. Whether Missouri also posts frost-law weight reductions elsewhere was not determined, and it is not claimed absent.

Those length rules sit alongside a weight ceiling that is the same across the state, 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 and length, 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, and the thin record changes none of it. Day cabs and road tractors off the river lanes. Farm trucks and grain hauls off the country around the city. Dump trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, 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. None of the ways of collecting is unusual 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 nobody visiting at all. Bringing it to us is just as fine. Across Buchanan County and Andrew County either side of the river road, the same equipment turns over every year.

• 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 is thinner than the others. Why?Because the research on this city is thinner, and padding it out would mean inventing things. We hold four records for St. Joseph and no bridge survey, so we have told you what we have and left the rest alone.
• It hauled grain.Worth mentioning. Missouri lets grain and grain co-products run ten per cent over the limit during harvest, off the interstate, so a grain truck here has spent part of its life loaded heavier than most other trades legally could be.
• 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 Buchanan County and Andrew County and the ones around them, and up into the river counties. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a route changing, 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. The yard here sits 2.79 miles from the middle of town, and Buchanan County usually has one parked somewhere.