We buy trucks in Barling

One rail row is attached to this town, 0.97 miles from the centre, worked by the Fort Smith Railroad. What it serves is Fort Chaffee, the former army installation next door.

Much of that ground has passed into civilian redevelopment while a Joint Maneuver Training Center carries on over part of it. So the land beside the town is neither wholly a post nor wholly an industrial park, and the traffic reflects both.

How much of either moves by rail today is a question this page cannot answer.

That is stated rather than filled in. Current rail traffic over the Fort Chaffee yard and the list of tenants on the redeveloped ground were not determined from any source read, so this page names neither.

It matters because the obvious inference — a former army post, therefore heavy military haulage — is exactly the kind of thing that reads well and may be wrong. A redevelopment site and a Joint Maneuver Training Center generate very different truck movements from each other, and from a working installation. Absence of a figure is not a small figure.

What does not depend on any of that is the law, and what happens when you sell.

That law starts with weight, and for a tandem the sharpest edge in it is an axle count.

Ark. Code § 27-35-203 holds a single axle to twenty thousand pounds and two or more consecutive axles to thirty-four thousand. Where a vehicle takes the section’s axle variance, three axles may not exceed seventy thousand pounds gross and four or more may not exceed eighty thousand — ten thousand pounds settled by the axle count alone, 31.75 metric tonnes against 36.3.

A second limb reaches older equipment. Where a vehicle carries no plate attached by the manufacturer giving its axle and gross ratings, the maximum allowed on the front or steering axle is twelve thousand pounds, which turns a rating question into a statutory one on any truck old enough to have lost its plate.

Ark. Code § 27-35-203. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is that one sentence.

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 stops a sale.

The salvage rule brands a vehicle where it is water-damaged as the rule defines that — a limb of its own, needing no percentage — or where other damage reaches seventy per cent of average retail value in a pricing guide the Commissioner has approved. It does not apply to vehicles more than seven model years old before the year of the occurrence that caused the damage, which is most of what we buy.

Arkansas DFA administrative rule 006.05 2007-8, read alongside § 27-35-203. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, farm trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Sebastian County speciality — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. Most of what turns up comes off the roads around Fort Chaffee, a contractor’s yard, or a farm lane that sees neither.

• Do you come out here, or is it all remote?Either. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us. All four are ordinary across Sebastian County and out around Fort Chaffee, and the remote purchase needs nobody on site.
• 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.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• 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. A lienholder means a payoff and a release, and that is the slow part.
• It was surplus off a government contract.We buy those, and the only thing that changes is the paperwork. Tell us how the title came to you and whether anything is still recorded against it — that is much easier settled at the start than after somebody has driven out.

Those answers matter more than the history does, because the reasons behind the call are ordinary. Retiring. A medical that didn’t go the way it used to. A contract ending, or a yard clearing out equipment it no longer runs. A truck standing behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it doesn’t turn a wheel.

Around Sebastian County and the roads skirting Fort Chaffee there is usually one waiting.

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.