We buy trucks in Troy

Magruder Limestone runs the quarry here, records 8 employees, and sits 3.76 miles from the middle of Troy. The same company holds two more researched sites in the country north of the city, and between them they make a point about the record that is worth a seller’s attention.

Of the three rows, two carry a defect. One names a city 17.63 miles from its own coordinates. The other is assigned to Lincoln County while both its coordinates and its city sit in Pike County. Only the Troy row is clean.

That is a property of the record rather than of the company. An operator with several sites in adjoining counties is exactly where a county field derived from an office address rather than from a pit will go wrong, and this is what it looks like when it does.

The equipment reading is the ordinary regional-operator one: machines move between the company’s own sites as the work moves. So a machine off this operator may carry more than one county’s wear, and the record will not tell you which. You can, and it is the most useful thing you can say about it.

That clean row is the one worth measuring from. Within ten miles the national bridge file counts 103 structures, of which eight carry a posting and six are coded below legal loads, three of the six county-maintained.

Across Lincoln County 8 of 102 county-maintained structures fail the load test, comfortably under the Missouri county-maintained rate. This is not restricted country, and the posted group here has a median operating rating of 30.6 metric tonnes, which no loaded stone truck approaches.

The nearest restricted crossing is 2.75 miles out. The lowest operating rating among the six is 14.4 metric tonnes, about 15.9 US tons, and that is also the lowest one that admits a commercial vehicle at all — there is nothing here below the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, which is unusual in this lane. Over the tare it leaves roughly 3.4 tonnes of stone against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.

So every restricted crossing within ten miles of this pit is at least usable empty, and most loads never meet one. That is an easier working life than most of the pages in this lane describe, and a truck off it usually looks the part.

Those crossings sit under the state ceiling, and Missouri writes it in a single section.

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. Farm trucks and grain trucks off the Lincoln County ground. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Across Lincoln County and Pike 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.
• It worked more than one of this operator’s pits.Then tell us which ones. Machines move between Magruder Limestone’s sites as the work moves, and two of the company’s three rows have locations that do not check out.
• Are the bridges round here a problem?Not really. Six crossings within ten miles fail the load test, none of them below an empty tandem’s tare, and the county restricts well under the state rate.
• 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 Lincoln County and the ones around it, Pike County and Warren 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 Lincoln County and Pike County and Warren County there is usually one sitting.