We buy trucks in Colusa

The one industrial node our data attaches to this city is the TRP Table Mountain Plant, where MSHA records 19 employees — and its coordinates lie 35.37 miles from the city centroid, in Butte County. It is filed here because the city written on the mine’s registration is an address rather than a geography.

We would rather report that than quietly let a page claim a quarry it does not have. It is worth knowing anyway, because that plant sits in the part of the state where the roads actually bite.

Those foothills are the exception to California generally. The state is the mildest road environment measured across sixteen states, with 1.4 percent of its structures coded below legal loads — and its tightest caps are in the Sierra Nevada foothills. TRP Table Mountain carries a commercial floor of 13.3 metric tonnes, which admits about 2.3 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump.

Butte County posts eleven of the 247 bridges it maintains. Neighbouring foothill counties differ sharply from each other — El Dorado posts five of 80, Amador one of 29, Tuolumne one of 54 — so a statewide rate says nothing useful about any one of them.

One thing we cannot tell you: whether a seasonal or frost restriction applies up there. Section 6 of the state rule file lists seasonal and frost-law restrictions as not determined, and the Sierra Nevada and its foothills are exactly where such a rule would live if it exists. Not determined is not the same as absent.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. The Sacramento Valley floor around this city is rice and row-crop country, which puts farm trucks and grain hauls on the road in numbers, with flatbeds and day cabs moving between the fields and the driers.

Dump trucks and aggregate haulers belong on the list for the construction and levee work, and pickups and work trucks are on it because they are everywhere rather than because they say anything about this county. It is flat-ground work, which is a different life from the Butte County grades that quarry truck runs.

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. Out here the common one is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, so the sale does not wait on anybody driving out. 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.