We buy trucks in Lodi

Two working sites are filed to this place and they could hardly be less alike. Lodi Yard is carried under the Central California Traction Company — a short line rather than one of the two big western railroads — and its coordinates lie 2.27 miles from the centroid of town. The other is a construction sand and gravel plant operated by Knife River, with 8 employees on the record.

A short line and a small gravel plant both run their equipment hard and keep it a long time, which is a fair description of most of the trucks that come up for sale around here. What it hauled and what has been replaced tells us more than the odometer reading does, so put both on the form.

Those two sites are also where the record runs out, and we would rather say so than fill the gap. No facility-level source was found for the Central California Traction Company yard itself, so we have no traffic figure for it and are not going to estimate one from the industry around it — county context is not yard traffic, and pretending otherwise is how a page ends up stating something nobody measured.

The second gap matters more if you farm. California’s agricultural weight provisions are not extracted into the state rule file we work from, and we did not determine them. That is not the same as saying there are none: absence has not been established, and in a county like San Joaquin, which grows a great deal and hauls all of it, that is exactly the question a seller asks. If your truck ran on farm plates or under an agricultural exemption, tell us what it ran under and we will work with what you know rather than what we have guessed.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Around the vineyards in San Joaquin County that means farm trucks and flatbeds on the crush first, then dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Knife River plant, box trucks on distribution, day cabs on short hauls out to the valley highways, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

Stockton is south with Galt north, and Woodbridge and Lockeford are the near villages; all four carry pages of their own, and all four sit in the same corner of the Central Valley. It is the same form whichever one you start on.

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. Around here we can come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.