We buy trucks in North Merritt Island

The row filed under North Merritt Island is a NASA rail yard. NASA has operated its own railroad on Merritt Island since Apollo, running from the launch complex out to the Florida East Coast Railway at Titusville.

Whether that connection is still intact, what runs on it and how often were not determined. Federal installations do not publish their logistics in the sources this research worked, and it is the third government-carrier row in the file to end that way — the other two are Port Chicago and Seal Beach in California.

So the railroad is a fact and its current traffic is not. Those are different things and they stay apart here.

So the second thing about this row is where it lands. It resolves to North Merritt Island at 8.26 miles — which is the same resolution the research already recorded as wrong for Port Canaveral in the principal-port layer, and recorded as fixed.

It came back. That makes two independent instances of a central fix not reaching the rail-yard rows, after a cluster at the Port of Los Angeles that behaved identically. The cause is a wide coastal polygon whose centroid falls inland, so anything on a barrier island gets pulled towards the middle of it.

Which is worth a seller knowing for one reason only: it explains why a truck’s paperwork sometimes names a place nobody who works there would use.

Which brings it back to what actually rolls. A launch complex and the yards supporting it move oversize and heavy loads on lowboys and flatbeds, and a rail connection exists at Titusville for what does not go by road at all.

Alongside that is the ordinary Brevard County mix: tippers on construction, service bodies for the trades, box trucks, and the pickups behind all of it. A single-unit dump truck is capped at 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, so the trip count runs ahead of the tonnage on that work.

None of it is a claim about NASA’s own traffic, which was not determined. It is what a county with a launch complex in it puts on the road.

So it is worth having the numbers rather than the impression. Florida allows 80,000 lb gross including all enforcement tolerances and 20,000 lb on a single axle.

A single-unit vehicle used as a dump truck, mixer, waste vehicle or fuel tanker may not exceed 70,000 lb gross including the weight of the vehicle. The divisible-load permit adds ten per cent off the interstate system only and does not reach those single-unit vehicles.

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

Those are the load. The paperwork is the part that decides how fast a sale closes, and on anything that worked inside a federal installation there is one question ahead of the rest: whether it was ever road-registered in the ordinary way.

Past that it is routine. We need a title 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.

The plate stays in the owner’s name and comes off the truck — transferred to a replacement vehicle of the same class, or surrendered to the county tax collector.

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

All of it is iron we buy across Brevard County. Flatbeds and lowboys off heavy moves, dump trucks and aggregate haulers held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, day cabs and road tractors, box trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew — the same across Merritt Island and over the causeway to Titusville.

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.
• My paperwork names a town I have never worked in. Is that a problem?No, and it is common here. This row itself resolves 8.26 miles from the yard because a wide coastal polygon puts its centroid inland. On a Brevard County truck we read the coordinate and the county before the city field.
• 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 heavy-haul contract on the Space Coast that ended and left one lowboy standing in a Brevard County yard with nothing booked for it.

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.