We buy trucks in Riviera Beach

The rail row filed under Riviera Beach is the Port of Palm Beach, and its coordinate is where that port actually is. On most pages in this lane that would be the dull sentence. Here it is the interesting one.

The same port appears in another layer of the same file attached to Belle Glade, a farming town 10.65 miles inland, and the research brief records that as the worst principal-port misresolution it found. So the file holds one port twice over, once in the town it is in and once in a town with no water at it. This is the entry that got it right.

What that means for a seller is small and worth saying: we read the coordinate and the county before we read the town on a line of paperwork. A wrong-looking address changes nothing about a sale.

So set the port aside and take the railway. The Florida East Coast Railway runs about 350 miles down the Atlantic coast and connects to the national network in exactly one place, at Jacksonville.

That railway, US 1 and I-95 all run within a few miles of the ocean, with very little road network east of them. North and south are straightforward. East and west are constrained, and when the corridor closes there is no short alternative to take instead.

For a truck working out of Palm Beach County that means the route is rarely a choice. It is a band, and everything runs along it.

Which is what makes the mix here wider than a corridor town’s usually is. Work off the Port of Palm Beach is short, heavy and repetitive — tankers, flatbeds, rollbacks and the yard equipment behind them, turning inside a few miles all day. Corridor work is the opposite: day cabs and road tractors running the length of that band and back.

The two wear in opposite directions. A single-unit dump truck in this state is capped at 70,000 lb gross where a tractor-trailer combination gets 80,000 lb, and a truck that spends its life at the heavy end of that under repeated short cycles shows it in the driveline rather than on the odometer.

So on anything sold around Palm Beach County, or over at West Palm Beach, the first thing we establish is which of those two lives the truck had. Neither one changes whether we buy it.

So the load rule matters more here than it would inland. 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 — so not on I-95, which is the road this band actually runs on — and it does not reach those single-unit vehicles anyway.

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

Those are the load. The paperwork is what decides how fast a sale closes. We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither is unusual and neither stops a sale.

The plate stays in the owner’s name rather than going with the truck — onto a replacement vehicle of the same class, or back to the county tax collector.

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

Both of those are iron we buy. Tankers and flatbeds off the port side of Palm Beach County, day cabs and road tractors off the coastal band, dump trucks and aggregate haulers held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, box trucks, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew — the same over at West Palm Beach and up at Mangonia Park.

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 registration shows an inland address for a truck that has only ever worked the port. Does that matter?Not to us. The file we work from carries the Port of Palm Beach twice, once here and once attached to a town 10.65 miles inland, so a mismatched address line is something we expect around Palm Beach County rather than something we query.
• It has spent its whole life inside a few miles. Is that worse than highway work?No, just different. Short heavy cycles wear the driveline and the brakes where highway miles wear other things. We read for the pattern rather than for the reading on the dash.
• Do you come out?Yes. We can come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it. We can also buy it where it stands and arrange the tow with no visit at all, and you’re welcome to bring it to us if that suits you better.
• 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 contract off the Port of Palm Beach that went away and left one tanker standing in a Palm Beach County yard, or up at Mangonia Park, or over at West Palm Beach, 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.