We buy trucks in Los Angeles

The Port of Los Angeles moves about 35 percent of its intermodal containers over its own rail network — one near-dock and five on-dock railyards serving seven container terminals. Roughly two thirds leave by road.

That split is the shape of the work here. A box that does not go out behind a locomotive goes out behind a tractor, and the tractors doing it run short, repetitive days between the terminals and the warehouse floor inland rather than long ones out of state.

Those railyards are not all inside the city, and the ones that are not have pages of their own. The Alcoa Yard coordinate falls inside Torrance. El Segundo Yard falls inside El Segundo. Exchange Ave A Yard and Malabar Yard both fall inside Vernon.

None of that is an error. This city covers about 469 square miles, so a node seven miles from the centre is still inside it, and the Harbor Gateway strip carries some of them ten and eleven miles out. It matters only because it tells you where the work actually sits: the Vernon–Commerce industrial belt south and east of downtown, not the civic centre. Municipal truck routes differ across Los Angeles, Vernon and Commerce, and we have not established how.

Four more of the rail rows here are passenger facilities rather than freight yards — Metrolink and Amtrak maintenance shops. A coach yard generates a different and much smaller amount of road work than a freight yard, so we do not read them as freight and neither should a page.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. What the port district puts on the road is mostly day cabs and road tractors, because the runs are short and the box comes off a chassis. Further inland it broadens into box trucks and straight trucks for distribution work, dump trucks and aggregate haulers on the construction side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere. That last group is not a Los Angeles thing in particular — they are everywhere.

Drayage is where the unusual one bites. The state’s TRUCRS registry required internal-combustion drayage trucks to be registered by 31 December 2023, and from 1 January 2024 only zero-emission drayage trucks could be newly registered. A grandfathered truck runs to at least 13 years from the engine’s model year, up to 18 years or 800,000 miles.

The largest container terminal at this port sits on Terminal Island, and the drayage that serves it is exactly the work that registry governs. The registry record travels with the vehicle and cannot be recreated. So a truck that was registered in time carries something an otherwise identical truck cannot be given now, and if yours has that history it is worth saying so when you tell us about 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? However it goes, there is no clock on it: 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.