We buy trucks in Columbia

MSHA records 54 employees at Blue Mountain Minerals, whose coordinates lie 2.69 miles from the centroid of this place. That is a large payroll for a crushed-stone operation and a short distance, so the plant’s trucks and this town’s roads are the same roads.

A works that size keeps a fleet rather than hires one, and a fleet that is kept gets old in place. The trucks that come out of an operation like this are usually well known to the people who ran them, which is worth saying on the form — what has been replaced and when is the part a photograph cannot show us.

Those roads are measured, and the measurement is narrow enough to be useful. Within ten miles of the quarry the National Bridge Inventory records 69 structures. Two are coded posted for load on item 41 and two are coded below legal loads on item 70, and both of those are county-maintained. The nearest sits 8.92 miles out.

The lowest operating rating among them is 18.5 metric tonnes, about 20.4 US tons. Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle rather than the payload, so that cap admits roughly 7.5 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump. Read it as a ceiling on a loaded truck, not on an empty one.

Two cautions go with it. The county is one tier of four here — California holds 47.9% of its structures at state level, the counties 28.3%, the cities 19.6%, and 517 are held by the US Forest Service — so a county answer is not the whole answer. And ten miles is a circle, not a route: at 64.1% of the nodes measured for this work a tighter crossing turned up between ten miles and twenty.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Around here that means the quarry’s dump trucks and aggregate haulers, log trucks and timber rigs off the higher ground, flatbeds moving plant between jobs, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

If the truck actually lives closer to somewhere else, Sonora, East Sonora, Jamestown and Twain Harte all carry pages of their own. It makes no difference to what we pay attention to, and the form is the same one.

That is state law rather than anything local, and it is the rule truck sellers misquote most often. CVC sections 35550 to 35558 set a statutory range of 34,000 to 80,000 lb by axle count and spacing, and § 35551(a) is a table rather than the federal Bridge Formula — no formula is declared in the statute at all.

The California table does not exactly match the Federal Bridge Table, including at three and four axles. So a configuration that is legal under one can be over under the other, and “it makes bridge formula” is a claim about which table you mean. If someone has told you your truck makes it, that is worth knowing before you repeat it.

Does it have to run? No. But we buy complete trucks — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is nothing.

Do I need the title? We need a title, unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If it is lost, that is a replacement through the DMV and we will walk you through it. If there is a lien on it, say so on the form — that is why the question asks whether the title is in hand rather than whether you own the truck, because those are different situations and they go different ways.

What if it has been in a wreck? Tell us what happened and we will look at it as it is. California sets no percentage: CVC § 544 makes it a judgement about whether repair is economical, so nothing is decided by a formula before we have seen the truck.

How does it get collected, and how am I paid? There is no clock on any of this. Up here the common one is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so the sale does not wait on anybody driving up the hill. We also come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or you drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.