We buy trucks in Pine Bluff

Every rail row attached to this city belongs to Union Pacific, and there are three of them: the shops 2.12 miles from the centre, the yard recorded as IPC at 4.24 miles, and the main yard at 4.29 miles. A liquid bulk terminal run by Center Point Terminal Company works from Emmett Sanders Road.

So this is a freight town rather than a quarry town, and the difference shows in what comes up for sale. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation records a paper mill industry established here in the 1950s, and trucking, rail and barge all working off the river.

The shops are the part that has moved recently.

Those shops reopened. The carrier recalled its furloughed workers, called back and hired machinists, and advertised for boilermakers, electricians, mechanics and welders. The work began with more than four hundred locomotives needing critical repairs before normal operations could resume.

There is older iron here as well. The Railroad Museum occupies the 1890s Old Cotton Belt Shops.

Mill ownership has moved too. Suzano bought a paper mill in the city, and Twin Rivers sold its unbleached kraft mill to American Kraft Paper Industries. Which of them the yard recorded as IPC actually serves, and whether International Paper still operates at that address, could not be established from any source read — so this page does not say.

That freight moves under a weight statute, and the part of it that catches a tandem dump is an axle count.

Ark. Code § 27-35-203 holds a single axle to twenty thousand pounds and a tandem to thirty-four thousand. Where a vehicle takes the section’s axle variance, one with only three axles may not exceed seventy thousand pounds gross against eighty thousand at four or more — a ten-thousand-pound difference decided by nothing but the axle count.

There is a commodity-permit layer over the top of it. Section 27-35-210 covers permits for special cargoes, and it exempts forestry machinery from width and height limits while stating in terms that the exemption has no application to forest machinery travelling on federal interstate highways. A separate one-year permit covers a tractor and semi-trailer of at least five axles carrying agronomic or horticultural crops in their natural state above the § 27-35-203 gross, to a ceiling of one hundred thousand pounds. Whether that weight permit stops at the interstate the way the forestry exemption does was not established, and it is not assumed here.

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

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork comes down to that one sentence.

What follows it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

The salvage rule brands a vehicle where it is water-damaged as the rule defines that, or where other damage reaches seventy per cent of average retail value in a pricing guide the Commissioner has approved. But it does not apply at all to vehicles more than seven model years old before the year of the occurrence that caused the damage — and most of what we buy is well past that, so for a typical used truck the branding rule never reaches it.

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, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, tankers, car haulers and rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, farm trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Jefferson 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 Union Pacific yards, the mill roads, or a farm lane south of town that sees neither.

• Do you come out here, or is it all done remotely?Both happen. 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. A good number here are bought remotely with nobody on site — anywhere in Jefferson County and out past the Union Pacific yards.
• 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 came out of a shop fleet, not a haulage fleet.We buy those too. A truck that spent its life on short local runs and long idle spells wears differently from a highway tractor, and neither is a problem as long as it is all there.

Those answers matter more than the freight 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. A truck standing behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it doesn’t turn a wheel.

Around Jefferson County and the roads feeding the Union Pacific yards 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.