We buy trucks in Empire

Empire sits in Clear Creek County and carries one row, and it is a large one. Henderson Operations is an underground molybdenum mine run by Climax Molybdenum Company, working 373 employees and continuously active since February 1973.

The unusual part is where the ore goes. The mine is on the east slope and its mill is on the west slope, and the two are joined by a tunnel driven beneath the Continental Divide rather than by a road over the top of it.

Together with a surface operation at Leadville working 315 employees, both under the same company, this is most of the primary molybdenum capacity in the United States. That is a large industrial employer for a very small town, and it sets what drives here.

That tunnel is the reason this is not a haulage town, and the history is worth having. It opened in 1976 to carry ore under the divide by rail, sparing the long surface haul over Berthoud Pass, which closes in winter snow. By 1999 a conveyor had replaced the train and been extended to about 15 miles, and the trains stopped running.

So the single heaviest flow of material out of this place has not touched a road in nearly fifty years. Anyone expecting a mine of this size to generate a matching fleet of haul trucks on the pass road would be expecting something the tunnel was built to prevent.

What is left on the road is everything else a 373 employees operation needs: service trucks, crew vehicles, contractors, deliveries and the plant that moves between jobs. Real traffic, but not ore traffic.

Beyond the tunnel, the thing that shapes a vehicle here is the road itself. Berthoud Pass closes in winter snow, and a truck working out of Clear Creek County spends its life climbing, descending and waiting.

That is hard on specific things rather than on everything. Brakes and cooling take the descents, the driveline takes the climbs, and the body takes whatever is used on the road surface in a mountain winter. A mile up here uses a machine harder than a mile on the plains does, so the odometer understates the work.

Colorado’s chain law and seasonal traction restrictions are not carried in the central rule file and were not determined, so this page states none of them. That is a real gap for a mountain state and it is named rather than filled.

Whatever the truck has been climbing, two state rules reach the sale itself, and one of them marks the vehicle rather than the paperwork.

Colorado’s salvage rule is physical. Under C.R.S. § 42-6-136.5 a purchaser of a vehicle that has become salvage must apply for a salvage certificate of title, and an owner who makes one roadworthy again needs a certified VIN inspection under § 42-5-202. To pass that inspection the applicant has to stamp the vehicle with a brand reading Rebuilt From Salvage, each letter not less than a quarter of an inch high.

The designation then becomes a permanent part of the certificate of title and appears on every title issued for that vehicle afterwards. Two forms carry it: DR 2415 establishes a rebuilt title from a salvage title, and DR 2424 is the statement of facts. In Colorado the history does not come off, and it is not only on paper.

What the threshold for becoming salvage is, we do not state. The central rule file identifies § 42-6-102 and records that it was not read, so no Colorado percentage appears here. The gross and axle schedule is not in that file either, and neither is the chain law, which for a mountain state is the gap worth naming rather than filling.

One thing worth correcting, because it reaches trucks and is usually reported the wrong way round. Colorado adopted Advanced Clean Trucks as the eighth state, applying from model year 2027 and growing through model year 2035, and it has been under challenge since the June 2025 repeal of California’s federal waivers. It is a manufacturer sales standard. It does not require a fleet, an owner, an operator or a dealership to buy a zero-emission vehicle, and it puts no deadline on anybody’s diesel.

C.R.S. § 42-6-136.5 and § 42-5-202, with Colorado DMV forms DR 2415 and DR 2424, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on Advanced Clean Trucks. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day those were read.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Service bodies and work trucks off the Henderson Operations ground. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers. Flatbeds carrying plant in and out of Clear Creek County.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, rollbacks, sleepers, tankers, car haulers and pickups too — not a mountain thing in particular, they run everywhere.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The brakes and the cooling have had a hard life.Expected on a pass truck and not a disqualifier. A machine working out of a 373 employees mine site at this altitude does its wearing on the descents. Tell us what has been replaced.
• It is rusty underneath from winter roads.Rust is not a disqualifier. What matters is that the truck is complete, not that it is clean.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.
• Will you come up here in winter?We will, and we also buy remotely and arrange the tow with nobody driving over the top at all. In a week when Berthoud Pass is shut that second route is the practical one, and we buy right across Clear Creek County.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a truck that has simply done the work, the reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract on the mine ground finishing and the service truck that went with it having nowhere to go next.

In a town this size, next to an operation working 373 employees, most of the vehicles belong to people rather than to fleets, and they stop when their owner does. Yards across Clear Creek County usually have one standing that never got its next job.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.