We buy trucks in Mulberry

Mulberry holds six rows in our file and three of them are called Prairie: Prairie, Prairie Jct and Prairie Jct West, all CSX, all inside three quarters of a mile of each other.

Prairie Jct and Prairie Jct West are a designator pair and are probably distinct. Prairie and Prairie Jct might be one place written two ways, and that cannot be settled from what we hold. It is recorded as an unresolved cluster rather than tidied up, because a de-duplicator that merged all three would delete a real facility.

The same care applies next door. Two of the W R Grace rows lie 0.19 miles apart and a third sits 1.31 miles off, under one carrier but carrying different facility numbers, so they are three facilities rather than one entered three times. W R Grace itself is treated here as a label off the source layer: whether that company operates at these locations today was not determined.

And the Prairie coordinate falls inside Fuller Heights, which has its own page, while the row is attached to Mulberry.

So the more useful thing to say about Mulberry is what the work actually is. This is Bone Valley, which reaches across parts of Hardee County, Hillsborough, Manatee and Polk, and mining here is required to reclaim what it mines.

Reclamation is not a tidy-up at the end of a job. It is a large, long-running earthmoving business in its own right, running alongside the mining rather than after it.

Which means the trucks are earthmoving trucks. Articulated haulers, on-road and off-road dumps, water trucks, lowboys to shift the iron between sites, and the service bodies and pickups that keep all of it going. They accumulate hours rather than miles, and a great many of those hours are not on a public road at all.

Those hours are short-radius by definition, and that is exactly where Florida’s weight rule pays out.

Bone Valley hauls run plant to plant, mine to plant and plant to port, and they are entirely off the interstate. The divisible-load permit adds ten per cent over legal gross and is void on the interstate system, so it does more work here than almost anywhere in the state.

The catch is who it does not reach. The ten per cent does not apply to a single-unit vehicle used as a dump truck, a concrete mixer, a waste collection vehicle or a fuel tanker, and Florida caps those at 70,000 lb gross against 80,000 for a combination. That exclusion lands on precisely the truck a small operator is most likely to own.

Fla. Stat. § 316.550(4), with § 316.535(6). Information, not legal advice.

Which raises the question that matters most on a reclamation fleet, because a good deal of that equipment never carried a plate at all.

Where a machine was never road-registered it is a title question before it is a condition question, and it is worth establishing early rather than on the day. Where the truck is road-registered, the position is one sentence: we need a title unless it is old enough that it never had one, a lost one has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.

The plate, if there is one, stays in your name and comes off the truck rather than going with it.

Fla. Stat. § 320.0609(1)(a). Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy, across the Hardee County and Polk end of Bone Valley. Articulated haulers and rigid dumps off the reclamation work. Water trucks and lowboys. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, tankers, box trucks, rollbacks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a Bone Valley crew.

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 has 900 hours and barely any miles. Is that a problem?No, and it is the normal shape of a machine that works a Bone Valley site rather than a road — a Prairie Jct reclamation job puts on hours a public road never sees. Hours are what we would rather hear about.
• 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 do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A reclamation contract in Hardee County or Polk that finished and left one hauler standing with nothing booked for it, out towards Fuller Heights.

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.