We buy trucks in Sullivan

The plant here records 6 employees, 4.29 miles from the middle of Sullivan. The town straddles a county line; the quarry row is filed to Crawford County, and the county figures on this page are Crawford’s rather than Franklin’s.

Within ten miles the national bridge file counts 61 structures. Three carry a posting and two are coded below legal loads — and neither of the two is county-maintained, which is unusual enough to be worth stating on its own. Across this lane the restricted crossings are overwhelmingly county bridges; here they are not.

The nearest of the two is 4.02 miles out, and the lowest operating rating among them is 21.6 metric tonnes, about 23.8 US tons. That is the most generous floor measured anywhere in this lane: over an empty tandem dump’s 11.0-tonne tare it still admits roughly 10.6 tonnes of stone, against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.

So a truck out of this pit met almost nothing in its first ten miles, and what it did meet it could cross with a useful load on. That is a materially easier working life than the same machine would have had forty miles south, and it usually shows in the brakes.

That easy circle sits inside a county that is not easy. Across Crawford County 6 of 30 county-maintained structures fail the load test, about one in five, against a Missouri county-maintained rate closer to one in eight.

Both numbers are right and they describe different things. The circle is the ground within ten miles of the pit, most of it on the state system through a corridor town. The county figure covers everything Crawford County owns, much of it well south of here in country the quarry traffic never touches. A page that quoted only one of them would be describing a different truck.

Crawford County is also one of the places where the two bridge columns invert: it records six structures below legal loads against four coded posted, and neighbouring Washington County eleven against ten. That is the opposite of the metropolitan pattern, and it settles that the columns are independent codings rather than one being a subset of the other. The posting column does not merely overstate in the cities; out here it misses.

The operator is worth a line as well. The company running this plant holds three rows in three different counties, two of them portable registrations rather than fixed pits. A portable fleet means a machine’s history is a sequence of locations rather than one, so the plant number on the record names the plant and not the ground.

Those crossings are individual. The ceiling over them is the state’s.

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.

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, with impoundment until the fines are paid also on the table. 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, road tractors and flatbeds off the corridor traffic. Rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, farm trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Across Franklin County and Crawford County this country turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. We can come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it. We can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all, and you’re welcome to bring it to us if that suits you better.

• 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.
• Which county is this truck from?Sullivan sits on the line. The quarry row is filed to Crawford County and the road figures here are measured around it; Franklin County is the other half of the town.
• It moved between sites rather than staying put.That is this operator’s shape — three rows in three counties and two of them portable. A machine off a portable fleet has a sequence of locations behind it rather than one.
• 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, or come to you and tow it. We can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow with no visit at all, and you’re welcome to drive it to us if that suits you better.
• How far out do you come?All of Franklin County and Crawford County and the ones around them, Washington County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a season ending, 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. Across Franklin County and Crawford County there is usually one sitting.