We buy trucks in Port Costa

The Ozol Defense Fuel Support Point sits 1.62 miles from the middle of this village, on the Carquinez Strait in Contra Costa County, carried on the record as active and not a joint base. Its capacity, its acreage and its staffing were every one of them not established, and none of the three is guessed at here.

It is one of six fuel nodes this research turned up nationally — after Craney Island, Verona, Newington and Long Beach, with San Pedro making the sixth — and three of those six are in this state. That concentration is real and it is about as much as anyone can honestly say about what moves through the gate.

That second one is a rail yard. The Union Pacific yard 0.85 miles from the fuel point is also called Ozol — and it is the row the central list files to a page 44 miles south in Santa Clara County, because a small settlement a mile from Martinez shares its name with a city down there. Two Ozols within a mile of each other on this strait, and the freight one has been answering to somewhere else entirely.

None of that changes what a truck here has been doing. It is on the page because it is the difference between a fact about this shoreline and a fact borrowed from another one, and this page would rather be short than borrowed.

So whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. Along this water that means tankers off the fuel and refinery work, flatbeds and dump trucks on groundwork, box trucks and straight trucks on delivery rounds, work trucks and service bodies on the trades, and pickups everywhere. It is a small village next to a large amount of industry.

Crockett is next door and Martinez east, with Rodeo and Hercules west, all four in Contra Costa County, and Benicia across the water in Solano County; all five carry pages of their own. 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. Down a lane like this the usual answer is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow — but we can also come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or you can drive it to us. Payment is cash or electronic payment.