We buy trucks in Orlando

Our Orange County file carries eight rows — three rail yards, three military installations, a crushed-stone quarry and a liquid-bulk terminal. The military one filed under Orlando is called Orlando Naval Training Center, and anyone reading that would picture an operating Navy base.

Naval Training Center Orlando closed in 1999. What stands on part of the former grounds is an Army National Guard facility, which is real and is not the thing the name describes. Its acreage, strength and mission were not established, so that is the whole of what we know.

We are saying so rather than working round it. A page that treated a name from 1999 as current would be wrong by more than a quarter of a century, and there is no version of that a seller benefits from.

So this page does not claim to know the yards of Orlando. What it can do is be exact about the rules a truck sold here actually meets, and about the one thing we looked for and could not find.

That thing is Florida’s posted-bridge list. Where the state publishes it was not located. The National Bridge Inventory records every structure in the state, but which of them carries a posted sign is a separate list, and that is the one we could not find. On the Orange County network, where there are alternatives everywhere, it is a small gap; on a road with no alternative it is not.

The clearest illustration is not Orlando at all — in the Keys, US 1 is the only road and there is nothing to route around. Here there is almost always another way through. It is still a gap and it is still ours to name.

That gap sits over a weight rule which is, by contrast, easy to state.

Florida’s divisible-load permit allows ten per cent over legal gross weight and is void on the interstate system. So a permitted truck is legally heavier on a state road than it is on I-4, which inverts the assumption most people carry about which road is the permissive one. Route choice here is a legal decision before it is a time one.

And the permit does not reach single-unit dump trucks, mixers, waste vehicles or fuel tankers, which Florida caps at 70,000 lb gross on their own account.

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

Those two rules stop mattering the day the truck changes hands, and what is left is one sentence and its fixes.

We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost one has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. None of the three is unusual and none of them stops a sale.

Two Florida specifics sit behind it. The plate stays in the owner’s name and comes off the truck rather than going with it. And where an insurer has paid a total loss, an electronic lien recorded on the title is the actual blocker rather than the paperwork around it.

Fla. Stat. § 320.0609(1)(a) and § 319.30. Information, not legal advice.

All of it is iron we buy, and the mix in a metro this size is a wide one. Box trucks and straight trucks off distribution work. Day cabs and road tractors. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off construction. Flatbeds, tankers, service bodies, rollbacks, car haulers, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Most of it works inside Orange County rather than on a long haul, and the dump trucks among it run against a 70,000 lb ceiling rather than 80,000 lb.

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.
• 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.
• Do you only want highway tractors?No. A box truck off an Orange County route and a dump truck off a site are both ordinary here, and so is a pickup off the Army National Guard end of things. The offer does not depend on which one you have.
• 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 lease that ended and left one tractor too many in an Orange County yard, twenty-odd miles from the Naval Training Center that closed before most of them were built.

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.