We buy trucks in Oakland

The port here has two intermodal rail yards on the waterfront, at the heart of the marine terminal area — the busiest working shoreline in Alameda County — one operated by Union Pacific and one by BNSF. Union Pacific has run the West Oakland yards since 1996, originating and receiving both intermodal and general manifest traffic, with most containers coming from or going to the port.

Two railroads at one waterfront is not the usual arrangement, and it is the reason the container work here splits the way it does rather than funnelling through a single operator.

That West Oakland name appears in our data more than once. One row sits 0.91 miles from another carrying the same carrier and a transposed pair of letters in its name, and the two are filed under different cities — one here, one under Emeryville.

It is a duplicate that combines a misspelling with a cross-city split, which is exactly why neither check alone finds it: a spelling scan looks within a city and a city scan trusts the spelling. A slice-wide scan across all 2,459 rail-yard rows turned up fourteen such misspelling pairs within ten miles of each other. Another row filed here falls inside San Leandro, which carries a page of its own.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. The container side puts day cabs and road tractors on these roads in numbers and the runs are short and dense, which puts hours on a tractor without putting miles on it.

It is not only containers. Miller Milling Company runs a mill in Alameda County, which puts grain hauls and bulk trailers on the same roads, and the distribution belt adds box trucks, straight trucks and flatbeds. Dump trucks cover the construction, and pickups and work trucks are everywhere.

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.