Sell your semi truck for cash in Madison the easy and convenient way

Exactly one rail yard is attached to this city in the node list we compose from. It is recorded as Madison Yard, the operator is the Wisconsin and Southern Railroad, and its coordinate sits 3.57 miles from the middle of town, inside the place. That is the whole of what the file says about it.

What moves through it we could not establish from anything we read, so we are not going to characterise it. The coordinate deserves a caveat of its own as well: it is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point, which is how all 2,459 rail-yard rows in that file are derived. It puts you in the right part of the city, not at the right gate.

Whatever runs to it and away from it runs under one set of state limits, and those limits are written trade by trade. Wis. Stat. § 348.15(3)(a) caps the gross weight imposed by any one wheel, or by the wheels supporting one end of an axle, at 11,000 lb. Subsection (3)(b) caps any one axle at 20,000 lb, or 23,000 lb for an implement of husbandry or an agricultural commercial motor vehicle, and lets two consecutive sets of tandem axles impose 34,000 lb each where the first and last axles are 36 feet or more apart.

Then it starts naming names. Subsection (3)(bg) allows a milk carrier 21,000 lb on a single axle and 37,000 lb on two axles eight feet or less apart. Subsection (3)(br) allows the same for forest products and scrap metal, at 21,500 lb on a single axle. Both are capped at 80,000 lb gross.

Rock, sand, gravel and crushed stone appear nowhere in it. A pulpwood truck is allowed 21,500 lb on an axle in this state and a stone truck 20,000. That is not a grievance, it is just the baseline most of this trade works from, and it is why the relief other trades get is the first thing to check when somebody hands you a permit.

Wis. Stat. § 348.15(3). Information, not legal advice.

Beyond those figures the state runs three separate seasonal programmes, and they do three different things. A frozen road declaration is normally in force from the middle of December to late February or early March, and it raises what may be carried. The Class II programme runs from about the first of March to roughly the middle of May. Posted roads is a third programme under a different guideline, covering roads that carry less than the legal limit either periodically through the year or only while the ground is thawing.

The middle one is the one people get wrong. Class II is not a reduction in legal axle or gross weight at all. Under maintenance manual guideline 37.10 the department may restrict the travel of vehicles running on overweight permits, because the subgrade is unstable while frost is leaving the ground. It caps what a single-trip movement may weigh over those roads, it makes annual non-divisible permit holders avoid them, and it suspends every divisible load permit type on all state highways for the duration of the thaw. A truck at ordinary legal weight is not touched by it. A truck on a permit is.

And the list is not fixed anywhere. A Class II road is one judged to have unstable subgrade while frost is leaving the ground, and District Chief System Operations Managers decide which sections qualify each year. Around the middle of December the bureau of highway operations asks for those lists, combines them, and publishes a statewide list and map. Last year’s answer does not carry over to this year.

WisDOT maintenance manual 37.10, with Wis. Stat. §§ 348.26(2) and 348.27(2) behind it. Information, not legal advice.

That is the rule, and everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

One state definition is useful here mostly for what it does not reach. Wis. Stat. § 340.01(55g) defines a salvage vehicle as one less than 7 years old, not otherwise precluded from later registration and titling, damaged so that the estimated or actual cost of repair, whichever is greater, exceeds 70 percent of its fair market value. Most of what we buy is a good deal older than seven years, and for those trucks that definition does not reach them at all, whatever the arithmetic on the repair would say.

Two details sit inside that sentence and both do work. The test takes the larger of the estimate and the bill, so a cheap quote does not settle it. And a hail-damaged vehicle falls outside the definition entirely unless it is repaired with a replacement part — which means whether it counts can turn on what was done to it rather than on what happened to it.

Wis. Stat. § 340.01(55g). Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day it was read.

None of that changes what we are interested in. Day cabs and road tractors off the interchange work that the Wisconsin and Southern Railroad’s yard 3.57 miles out feeds and is fed by. Box trucks and straight trucks off the distribution and trades work in a city this size. Flatbeds. Service bodies, work trucks and pickups off crews. Whatever you drive, the offer does not change. We buy all of them.

We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody coming out at all. In a city this size every one of those is ordinary, and you are welcome to bring it to us instead 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.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• Do I have to bring it to you?No. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all. Bringing it to us is an option, never a requirement.
• It has spent its life on short interchange runs.Then the odometer understates it, and we would rather hear that from you than work it out later — the yard is only 3.57 miles out and a lot of that work never leaves the city. Brakes, frames and drivelines carry that pattern. It does not change whether we buy it.
• Do you come out past the city?Yes, and a long way past it — out beyond the Wisconsin and Southern Railroad’s yard and further than that. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• My truck is fifteen years old and was in a wreck once.Then the salvage definition in this state never reached it, because that rule stops at seven years. What matters to us is what the title says today.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

None of those questions is really the reason for the call. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and never got replaced. A day cab standing behind a shop a couple of miles from the Wisconsin and Southern Railroad’s yard 3.57 miles out of town, insured and taxed and not turning a wheel since the work stopped.

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.