We buy trucks in Santa Clara

Stevens Creek Quarry, run by Stevens Creek Quarry Inc, carries 56 people on the MSHA roll, and its coordinates sit 7.92 miles from the city centroid. What surrounds it is the unusual part: 421 structures lie within ten miles, the second densest network this survey has measured anywhere, behind only a mine on the edge of Indianapolis at 769.

Out of all 421, exactly one is coded below legal loads on item 70. That is 0.2 percent, the lowest node rate in 1,480 rows surveyed.

Whatever you drive, the offer does not change — we buy all of them. San Jose, Sunnyvale and Milpitas carry pages of their own if the truck lives closer to one of those. The mix on this side of the valley is the ordinary industrial one: box trucks and straight trucks on distribution, flatbeds and day cabs between the plants, dump trucks on the construction side, and pickups and work trucks everywhere.

That single restricted structure is NBI record 36C0073, carrying Either Way Lane, county-maintained, 9.12 miles out — and its operating rating is 9.4 metric tonnes. An empty tandem dump weighs 11.0. So the crossing is not a cap on what you can carry over it; it is below the weight of the vehicle with nothing in it.

Which is why no commercial floor is reported for this node at all. The honest sentence is that in a four-hundred-structure metropolitan network there is exactly one restricted crossing and a loaded truck simply does not use it. The county posts 10 of the 162 bridges it maintains, and this is one of them.

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.

That is the same code book that decides what a wreck does to your title, and it asks a question instead of setting a number. CVC § 544 makes a truck a total loss salvage vehicle when the owner, a leasing company, a financial institution or an insurer considers it uneconomical to repair and it is then not repaired.

So the figure people quote at you — 70 to 75 percent of actual cash value — comes from insurer practice and not from the vehicle code. It is worth knowing which of the two you are being told, because one of them is law and the other is a company’s own policy.

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. California has no numeric total-loss threshold at all — CVC § 544 asks whether repair is economical and leaves the judgement to the owner, the lender or the insurer — so no percentage decides anything here before we have looked.

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.