We buy trucks in St. Louis

Nine rail yards are attached to St Louis. Three of them — 23rd Street, Carrie Ave and Carrie Avenue — run under the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis, which is the sort of company a city ends up with when enough railroads arrive to need a referee between them. The rest are BNSF at Chouteau, Lindenwood and North St. Louis, Union Pacific at Lesperance, Norfolk Southern at Luther, and Foster Townsend Rail Logistics at Arsenal.

Two of those nine are one yard counted twice. Carrie Ave and Carrie Avenue lie 0.04 miles apart under the same carrier and differ only in whether the street type is spelled out. Luther is the harder case: a second row sits about a fifth of a mile due north of it under a different carrier, drawn from the same dataset, derived the same way, in the same county. That is what two sample points along one long north-south yard would look like. It is equally what two adjacent yards on one north-south corridor would look like. It was examined and not resolved, and it is left unresolved here.

Those yards all feed one waterway, and the waterway is why the city is where it is. The port is carried as a single district spanning Missouri and Illinois, running about 70 miles along both banks, and it is the northernmost ice-free point on the Mississippi.

That last part changes what a used truck out of here has been through. Above this point the river system works in bursts with long idle spells between them; here it runs all year. So equipment wears out rather than seizing up, and the machine that comes out of a continuous operation has a different set of tired parts from one that sat out a freeze every winter.

Four of the operations in this batch are portable plant registrations rather than fixed sites, and one of them sits half a mile from its own company’s quarry while the record files it under a different county with a city field thirteen miles away. A portable plant gets moved to the work rather than the work being brought to it, so its history is a run of jobs in different counties and its registered address may only describe an office. If that is your machine, tell us where it actually worked. The paperwork will not.

That same distance between what a record says and where a truck has been runs through the road data too. 157 of St. Louis County’s 187 county-maintained structures are coded posted for load — 84.0 per cent, first of the 109 Missouri counties that maintain at least twenty. Seven are rated below legal loads: 3.7 per cent, ranking 94th.

Only the second of those is a restriction on this trade. The median operating rating of the 157 is 72.0 metric tonnes, about 79 US tons, which no loaded truck on this page approaches. Reported the other way round, the county would read as the most restricted road network in Missouri when it is among the least.

Measured where the work is, the numbers are small and specific. Within ten miles of that portable registration there are 607 structures, 129 of them posted, and nine rated below legal loads. Three of the nine are county-maintained, the nearest is 0.51 miles out, and the lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 24.8 US tons.

Jefferson Barracks is the other crushed-stone operation on this page, 44 employees and 11.48 miles from the middle of the city. Between it and the portable plants, most of the stone equipment around here works a road network that reads far worse on paper than it drives.

Those crossings sit under a statutory ceiling that is the same across the state, and it carries one 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. Day cabs and road tractors off the river and rail lanes. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone. Box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, car haulers, 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. In a market 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. Bringing it to us works too. Across the yards the Terminal Railroad Association works, and the Norfolk Southern end at Luther, the same equipment comes up for sale 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.
• Does the emissions programme apply to my truck?No. St. Louis City and County are two of the four jurisdictions the programme covers, but it stops at 8,500 lb gross vehicle weight rating and every truck on this page is rated well above that. The area is inside it; the trade is not.
• It ran off a portable plant, so the paperwork says the wrong county.That is normal and it is not a problem. A portable registration records where the owner is administered, not where the machine worked. Tell us where it actually ran and we will go from there.
• My tanker hauled cement.Then say so, because in eastern Missouri that is a real question rather than a formality — a tank that carried frac sand has had a harder life than one that carried cement. It does not change whether we buy it.
• 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.
• How far out do you come?All of St. Louis County and St Charles County, and over the river into Illinois. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a lane going quiet, 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 from Carrie Avenue round to the Union Pacific side at Lesperance usually have one waiting.