We buy trucks in McGehee

This place owes its existence to a railroad decision. Missouri Pacific put its regional shops here in 1905, on about fifty acres conveyed to the Iron Mountain Railroad the year before for switch yards and shops. The railroad stayed the major employer for more than fifty years.

Then the roundhouse shops closed in 1954 and employment dwindled from there. The yards themselves did not go anywhere: three rail rows are still attached to the town, at 0.16, 0.23 and 1.19 miles from the centre.

Two of those three are the same yard.

Those yards are not idle. The North Louisiana and Arkansas Railroad and the Midland short line both serve the town directly, and Union Pacific reaches it indirectly through an interchange with the Midland. A line runs from the Union Pacific yard out to Cypress Bend, ten miles, taking in the Potlatch Spur of 3.4 miles along the way.

The duplicate is better named than counted twice. Two of the three rows sit 1.35 miles apart under the same carrier, and one name is simply the other with the carrier added in brackets. They are one facility written down twice.

Which is a long way of saying this is still a rail town with farm country around it, and both of those decide what is parked here.

Those farm roads run under a statute with a commodity layer built into it, and one permit is aimed squarely at crops.

Ark. Code § 27-35-210 carries a one-year permit for a truck tractor and semi-trailer combination of at least five axles hauling agronomic or horticultural crops in their natural state, allowing it above the ordinary maximum gross to a ceiling of one hundred thousand pounds. The same section exempts forestry machinery from width and height limits, and says in terms that the exemption has no application to forest machinery travelling on federal interstate highways. Whether the crop weight permit stops at the interstate in the same way was not established, and it is not assumed here.

Beneath the permits, § 27-35-203 holds a single axle to twenty thousand pounds and a tandem to thirty-four thousand, and caps a three-axle vehicle taking the axle variance at seventy thousand gross against eighty thousand at four or more.

Ark. Code § 27-35-210 and § 27-35-203. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the permits, 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 needing no percentage at all — 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 a farm keeps.

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. Farm trucks and grain hauls, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, tankers, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a place.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Desha 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 here is standing on a farm, beside a shop, or on the ground near the Union Pacific yard rather than in any fleet.

• Is anybody actually going to drive out here?Often nobody needs to. A good number of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, with no one on site at all. We also come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or take it if you drive it to us — anywhere in Desha County and out along the Union Pacific line.
• 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 is a farm truck that sits most of the year.We buy those. Seasonal work and long standing spells are ordinary on a farm truck — seals dry, batteries flatten, air systems weep — and none of that is a problem as long as it is all there.

Those answers matter out here because the reasons are ordinary and the nearest buyer is not close. Retiring. A medical that didn’t go the way it used to. A farm changing hands. A truck standing beside a barn since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it doesn’t turn a wheel.

Around Desha County and the fields either side of the Union Pacific line 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.