We buy trucks in Long Beach

The Port of Long Beach is the second busiest port in the United States, and the largest thing it is currently building is designed to take work away from trucks. The Pier B On-Dock Rail Support Facility programme will more than double that yard from 82 to 171 acres, more than triple the on-dock rail cargo handled annually from 1.5 to 4.7 million TEU, and add more than 130,000 feet of rail, taking it from 12 tracks to 48.

The port states the purpose plainly: to increase on-dock rail capacity and move cargo by rail rather than by truck. Whether it changes the road share, and by how much, is not something we can tell you — a stated purpose is not a measured outcome, and we are not going to treat it as one.

That is not the only place where the label and the thing have come apart here. One terminal yard still carries the Hanjin name; Hanjin Shipping filed for bankruptcy protection on 31 August 2016, when it was the seventh-largest ocean container carrier in the world. Pier T is operated today by Total Terminals International — 381 acres, 5,000 linear feet of berthing, vessels up to 20,000 TEU and 1.6 million TEU of annual capacity.

Two more worth knowing. A pair of rows a quarter of a mile apart name two different railroads at what is one facility recorded once per carrier, not a duplicate. And a row filed under this city for Pier 400 is not in this port at all — it belongs to the neighbouring port authority on Terminal Island, which sets its gate rules and its labour.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Drayage puts day cabs and road tractors on these roads in numbers, and the fuel terminal here is a tank-truck node, so tankers belong on the list too even though its capacity was never established.

The vehicle end is bigger than people expect. Toyota Logistics Services here is the company’s largest vehicle processing facility in North America and moves more than 200,000 vehicles off ocean ships each year, so car haulers and rollbacks are ordinary sights. The rail and road split of those outbound vehicles was not determined. Box trucks, flatbeds and pickups fill in the rest.

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. 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. Payment is cash or electronic payment.