We buy trucks in Pensacola

Two rows sit under Pensacola and they could hardly be less alike. One is the Shortleaf Borrow pit, a surface operation run by Ironhorse Services with two employees — the smallest registration anywhere in our Florida file. The other is a rail yard at Goulding.

The Goulding coordinate actually falls inside Brent, which has a page of its own, while the row is attached to Pensacola. Same treatment as everywhere else in this lane: we report the disagreement rather than move the pin. West Pensacola has a page too, and its own yard.

A borrow pit is worth a sentence because it decides what the truck is. It supplies fill for construction rather than crushed product for a market, so the haul is short, local and tied to whatever job is open.

So the trade that shapes most of the equipment around here is not fill. The Florida panhandle and south Alabama form one of the largest pine timber basins in the country, and the ports along this coast — from Goulding round to Panama City — exist to move what it produces.

Hurricane Michael came ashore as a Category 5 in October 2018 and flattened a large part of that basin. Storm-damage and storm-salvage history is therefore a fair question about equipment from this region, and we would rather ask it than assume.

Mill operating status was not verified and no operator is named, so that is a description of a basin and a storm rather than of anybody’s business.

Which is the honest shape of Pensacola: a two-person pit and a timber basin do not produce the same truck, and we buy both.

Fill work out of a pit like the Shortleaf Borrow is short hauls, many of them, on and off site, with the loading cycle doing more damage than the driving. Woods work is heavier, rougher and harder on frames and tyres, with a self-loader’s weight behind the cab on the log side of it.

You know better than we do which of those a given truck has been doing. Telling us says more than the odometer does on either one, and on a two-employee outfit like the Shortleaf Borrow pit under Ironhorse Services, one truck usually carried the whole job.

Both of those run under Florida’s rule until they cross, and the crossing is close. Alabama begins about 10 miles from here and gives forest products a 102-inch width allowance with no gross variance at all.

Florida gives the opposite kind of thing: a divisible-load permit of ten per cent over legal gross, void on the interstate system, naming no commodity. And it does not reach a single-unit dump truck, mixer, waste vehicle or fuel tanker, which are held to 70,000 lb gross against 80,000 lb for a combination.

Fla. Stat. § 316.550(4) and § 316.535(6); Alabama’s rules are its own. Information, not legal advice.

Those rules stop mattering the day the truck changes hands. We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

Everything past that is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. The plate stays in your name and comes off the truck.

If an insurer settled anything after Hurricane Michael, an electronic lien recorded on the title is the thing that actually holds a sale up.

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

All of it is iron we buy. Log trucks and timber rigs off the pine basin. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off fill work like the Shortleaf Borrow pit, held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb. Flatbeds and day cabs off the Goulding end of the yard work, box trucks, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a small 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 is a two-truck outfit and this one did everything. Does that hurt it?No. On a registration the size of Ironhorse Services one truck carries the whole job, and that shows in hours rather than miles.
• It worked storm salvage after Hurricane Michael. Does that count against it?No, and we would rather know. It is hard running and it puts on hours the odometer never shows.
• 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.

Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A fill contract that finished and left the one truck at Ironhorse Services standing, or a woods job that ended out past the Shortleaf Borrow pit with nothing booked behind 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.