We buy trucks in North Little Rock

This is Union Pacific’s operational hub in the state, and the scale of it is not local. The yard here holds the largest locomotive repair shop and the second-largest freight car classification yard anywhere on that carrier’s system — not the second largest in the state, on the system. Its row sits 0.65 miles from the centre of town.

A shop and a classification yard of that size generate their own road traffic: parts, scrap, fuel, spoil, and the constant local haulage that keeps a repair operation fed.

And the river adds a second layer on top of it.

That second layer is liquid and loose bulk. Center Point Terminal Company works a terminal on Gribble Street, and a second liquid bulk terminal is recorded 2.3 miles out with no operator named in the source.

Two sand operations sit alongside them. B & B Materials is carried as a surface operation working industrial sand with three people, and Jeffrey Sand runs the Floating Plant Armstrong, a dredge, with three more. Both fall under Part 46, which requires site-specific hazard awareness training for over-the-road delivery drivers before they work at each mine site — each site, not each company.

Mine Safety and Health Administration open data and Part 46; terminal rows from the national liquid bulk facilities layer.

All of that freight runs under one state weight statute, 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, tankers, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, rollbacks and car haulers, 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 river-terminal 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 shop gates, the terminals along Gribble Street, or the sand plants Jeffrey Sand works.

• Do you come out, or is this 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 here — across the river, out to the terminals along Gribble Street, and around the shop gates — and the remote purchase needs nobody on site at all.
• 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 yard truck that rarely went on the highway.We buy those. A truck that spent its life on short in-plant moves — around a dredge like the Floating Plant Armstrong, say, or a terminal gate — has hours rather than miles on it, and often a lot of idle time, which shows up in different places from highway wear. Tell us the hours if the meter has them.

Those answers matter more than the tonnage does, because the reasons behind the call are ordinary. Retiring. A medical that didn’t go the way it used to. A company changing hands, or shedding a truck 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 the shop gates, the sand plants Jeffrey Sand works and the terminals run by Center Point Terminal Company, 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.