We buy trucks at Fort Irwin

The National Training Center reservation encompasses more than 642,000 acres of training area, and its coordinate reverse-geocodes to San Bernardino County. Training throughput, rotations and employment were not established here, so this page does not put a figure on any of them.

What the acreage does tell you is that distances inside and around it are long, and that anything with a gate in front of it needs arranging before it needs collecting. If your truck is behind one, say so on the form and we will sort access first.

Those acres are not an outlier here. Our records carry three California installations at 642,000, 596,000 and 301,000 acres — this one, Twentynine Palms and Edwards — plus 125,000 acres at Camp Pendleton: about 1.66 million acres in four rows, in one state.

No ranking goes with that. The size ranking was retired after five revisions and one error, and what stands instead is the range: from about 2.2 million acres at White Sands down to 15.3 at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, with active status at both ends. Four numbers in a row are a fact; an ordering of them was a mistake we made and stopped making.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Out here the mix is dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds and day cabs, box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Barstow is the nearest town of any size, and Yermo, Lenwood and Silver Lakes carry pages of their own too. That road down off the post is the only one, and it is the reason so much of what we buy in San Bernardino County we buy without anybody driving it.

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 realistic path is usually that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, and if the truck sits behind a gate we sort access before anything moves. 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.