Cement
A plant here, and its market on the far side of a mountain
CalPortland’s Mojave Plant and Quarry reports 133 employees to MSHA and is carried as a cement operation. It sits on Oak Creek Road about 15 miles south-east of Tehachapi, on SR-58, with the rail line and the aerospace field alongside.
Greater Los Angeles is about 110 miles away and there is a mountain in between. That single fact shapes more of the trucking here than the plant does: this is a haul into one large market over a pass, not the short urban distribution of a city plant or the terminal network of a rail hub.
That belt is the densest cement concentration in the western states
That plant is not on its own. Four cement plants sit in San Bernardino County and three in Kern, and it is a desert limestone belt rather than a river or coastal one — the densest such concentration in the western United States in our data.
The plants sit between 2,500 and 4,000 ft, with the Tehachapi and Cajon passes between them and their customers, so sustained grade work is hard on brakes, cooling and driveline in a way that flat running is not. That is a property of the route rather than a claim about any operator’s equipment.
And scale does not predict trucking here the way people assume. The Mojave Northern Railroad, owned by CEMEX USA, hauls limestone to that company’s plant near Victorville from quarries north-east of there — so the inbound raw material at that plant generates no highway movement at all. The outbound is a separate question and was not established.
What runs here
Mines, cement and a very long way to anywhere
So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Cement and aggregate put dump trucks, mixers and aggregate haulers on these roads; tankers and flatbeds serve the plants; day cabs and road tractors make the run over the pass; pickups and work trucks are everywhere.
Mining is here too. The state’s SMARA register carries Soledad Mountain as active in Kern County with silver as its primary product, operator Golden Queen Mining Co., and 1,106 acres disturbed of 1,188 permitted — while MSHA and our own node list both record it as gold ore. We have not reconciled that and we are not going to paper over it.
Because of the distances, the realistic path here is usually that we come to you. Driving it to us stays on the table and always will, but we are not going to present it as an equal third option to somebody a hundred miles out over a mountain.
California weight law
The weight table here is not the federal one
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.
Questions we actually get
The four that come up every time
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 a drive across the desert. 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.
Sell your truck in Mojave
Mojave, Tehachapi and the high desert around them. Most sales out here we buy remotely and arrange the tow — tell us what you have and nothing waits on a drive across the desert.
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