We buy trucks in Jacksonville

Florida is a peninsula and Jacksonville is the way in and out of it by rail. Eight yards are filed here across three railroads — six CSX, Florida East Coast’s Bowden and Norfolk Southern’s Simpson — and CSX Transportation has its corporate headquarters in the city. The yard on the western edge, historically West Jacksonville, is a classification hub and the interchange point between all three.

The freight is lopsided, and that is the part that reaches a truck. Florida consumes far more than it produces, so loaded trucks come south on I-95 and I-75 and the northbound leg is much harder to fill. Car counts and interchange volumes were not determined, so we are describing a direction and not a size.

So the working pattern is not the one a mileage figure implies. A truck can run a full leg south, spend real time repositioning, and come back light. The wear is in the coupling, the low-speed work and the waiting rather than at road speed.

The other half of the local fleet never leaves a site. Marine Corps Support Facility Blount Island runs the logistics for the Maritime Prepositioning Ships programme: in one recorded cycle eleven ships were off-loaded and back-loaded and an estimated 250,000 pieces of equipment were refurbished, repaired, modernised or replaced during 45- to 65-day maintenance cycles, across more than 33 acres of staging beside a 1,000-foot pier on the St Johns River.

Equipment on a closed site like that carries near-zero mileage and enormous hours, constant fifth-wheel and air-system cycling, and tyres scrubbed on tight turns. A good deal of it was never road-registered, which makes it a title question before it is a condition question — and it lives in river air, so corrosion is in the account as well.

Those two shapes sit inside a military presence that is large even for Florida. NAS Jacksonville is about 3,400 acres employing more than 21,000 active duty and civilian personnel, and Naval Station Mayport is home port to 22 US Navy ships, with a harbour that can take 34 and an 8,000-foot runway.

But one row is more directly about this trade than anything else we hold. DLA-DRMS is the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service — how the Department of Defense sells surplus vehicles and equipment. It was reorganised into DLA Disposition Services and the row still carries the old name. A large share of the ex-military trucks in civilian hands came through a sale like that one.

If yours is one of them, two things matter more than the odometer: the age of the rubber and the length of the storage. Very low mileage against very high age is normal on those trucks, the tyres are often original and over-age, and the title history starts at the sale rather than at the factory.

One more row needs a correction rather than a description. Naval Air Station Cecil Field is carried as active and it closed on 30 September 1999 — most of the complex went to the Jacksonville Aviation Authority and the rest to NAS Jacksonville. We are not going to describe a depot that has been shut since 1999.

Which is where the city’s own shape starts to matter. Jacksonville is a consolidated city-county covering the whole of Duval County, about 875 square miles, so two rows that resolve fifteen and fourteen miles from the centre are both correctly inside it.

Two others are not inside it at all. Fort Myers Mine is filed under Jacksonville and sits 265 miles away in Lee County, on the other coast; the Calcium Plant is filed here and sits 126 miles away. In both, the county field and the coordinate agree with each other and the city field agrees with neither, which is what an office address does to a geography.

And one row we will not describe at all. A registration at Dames Point carries the commodity Dimension Granite, in a state whose surface geology is limestone, coquina, dolomite, phosphate and sand, with no granite bedrock at the surface. Something is there, and it is far more likely to be a terminal or a handling yard than a granite quarry — but we did not establish what, so we are not going to say.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the yards, most of them working Duval County and the legs south out of Norfolk Southern and East Coast interchange. Box trucks and straight trucks on the distribution end of the same run. Flatbeds, dump trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Ex-military trucks included, storage years and all.

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 engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• It came out of a government sale and has 9,000 miles on a 1994 chassis. Is that odd?Not here. Very low mileage against very high age is the normal shape of a surplus truck, and the tyres are usually the first thing to look at rather than the engine.
• 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; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
• How far out do you come?All of Duval County, which is most of a very large city, and out past it. Distance has never stopped a sale.

Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A lease that ended and left one tractor too many in a Duval County yard, or a surplus truck out of Disposition Services that has done its second life as well as its first.

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.