We buy trucks in Ste. Genevieve

Five crushed-stone operations are attached to Ste. Genevieve, and they span nearly the whole range this trade produces. Tower Rock records 170 employees to the federal mine regulator. Brickeys records 28, Roth 16, Hardstone Pit #1 eight, and Bauman Sand & Gravel three.

That first figure is the one to sit with. 170 employees makes it the second largest crushed-stone operation researched anywhere in Missouri and the fourth largest of the 2,122 rows in this dataset, behind one in Alabama at 280, one in Florida at 205 and the Annapolis quarry over in Iron County at 186. The median row in the same dataset employs fewer than ten people.

An operation of that size runs continuously, ships by barge as well as by road, and keeps a fleet big enough to have a written specification, a maintenance department and a replacement cycle. So its machines leave with records — which is the exact opposite of the one- and two-person registrations that make up most of this data, and it is worth knowing which end of that range a truck came from.

That barge leg is not a detail. Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau counties face the Mississippi across the Illinois line, and the limestone along it has been quarried and shipped by water since the eighteenth century — Ste. Genevieve is the oldest permanent European settlement in Missouri.

A quarry with river access has a mode a landlocked one does not. The longest hauls leave by water and the truck fleet does short local delivery, which inverts the usual reading: employment and tonnage stop predicting truck mileage, and the local road network says less about the business here than almost anywhere else in this data. No barge loading is claimed for any operation on this page. What is established is the employment, the river and the location.

The road figures are correspondingly quiet. Within ten miles there are 62 structures, five of them posted for load and three rated below legal loads, none county-maintained, the nearest 2.39 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 16.9 US tons. Across the county, one structure of 35 is rated below legal loads — 2.9 per cent, against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.7.

Two things in the record here were examined and not settled, and they are left that way. Two operations under different companies carry identical coordinates while the data gives them different towns, eleven and five miles from that point; what that represents is not determined. And one of the two rail yards attached to Ste. Genevieve carries the name of Cape Girardeau, 59.2 miles away under the same carrier, so either the name is wrong for this location or it records something named for Cape Girardeau elsewhere on the line.

Those barge miles never meet a weight limit. Everything that leaves by road does, and the ceiling is the same across the state.

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 longer legs. 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. Out here the straightest route is often that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody having to make the drive. We can also come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it, and if you are heading up the river road anyway you can bring it to us. Between Tower Rock at one end and Bauman Sand at the other, this county turns over the whole range of it.

• 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.
• It came off a big operation with full service records.Then bring them. On this stretch of the river the operations run from three people to a hundred and seventy, and a documented fleet machine is a very different proposition from a one-man registration. Both get bought; the records just make it quicker.
• Most of our stone goes out by barge. Does that matter?It matters to what the truck has been through, usually in your favour. Where the long hauls leave by water the road fleet does short local delivery, so the mileage can be well below what the size of the operation suggests.
• 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.
• Will you really come out this far?We will, and often we do not need to. We can buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all, or come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it. Bringing it to us stays an option.
• How far out do you come?All of this county and the ones around it, down as far as Cape Girardeau and out past Tower Rock. 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. Yards from the Roth Quarry round to the Tower Rock workings usually have one sitting.