Leon County
A big place that does not generate much freight
Tallahassee is a large place with small freight generation, and that combination decides more about a truck sold here than anything else on this page. The rail yard sits at the end of a branch serving a consumer city: what arrives is inbound distribution, and there is very little waiting to be loaded the other way.
No facility-level source was found for it, and the second row here — a reserve centre in Leon County — has no acreage, strength or mission established either. So neither gets described.
What can be said is the consequence. A truck working out of a distribution yard puts up a large number and does less revenue work than the number suggests, because half of every cycle is a return leg with nothing in it.
So the city pulls traffic it does not produce
So the freight that does move through here often starts somewhere else entirely. For the quarries out on the Big Bend coast — over towards Wacissa and Taylor County — Tallahassee is the nearest market of any size, sixty miles north-west up two-lane road.
Those pits sit on twelve structures within ten miles with nothing posted and nothing restricted, so what governs their haul is not a bridge rating. It is the distance to here.
That is the shape of a regional centre: it consumes what a wide, thinly-bridged hinterland produces, and the trucks doing the producing are not registered in Leon County at all.
Which makes the return leg the thing worth describing
Which is why the hours matter more than the odometer on a truck from around here, and why it is worth telling us what the work actually was.
60 miles loaded and 60 miles empty is a different kind of wear from the same run with something on both ways. Steady road time treats a driveline well; the loading and the waiting at either end in Leon County is where the hours go.
You know better than we do which of those a given truck has been doing. It is the most useful thing you can put in front of us.
Florida weight law
And the general schedule, which is two numbers and an exclusion
Both of those are about the truck. The weight rule is about the load.
Florida allows 80,000 lb gross including all enforcement tolerances and 20,000 lb on a single axle, and caps a single-unit dump truck, mixer, waste vehicle or fuel tanker at 70,000 lb. A 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.
Florida paperwork
We need a title — unless the truck never had one
Those numbers stop mattering the day the truck changes hands, and the paperwork is what is left.
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 is the Florida detail people miss: it stays in the owner’s name and comes off the truck, to be moved to another vehicle of the same class or surrendered to the county tax collector.
Fla. Stat. § 320.0609(1)(a). Information, not legal advice.
What we buy here
All of it is iron we buy. Box trucks and straight trucks off the distribution end of the work in Leon County. Day cabs and road tractors running the sixty miles out to the Big Bend and back. Log trucks and timber rigs off the panhandle woods, flatbeds, dump trucks held to 70,000 lb where a combination gets 80,000 lb, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Tallahassee
- 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 runs out empty and comes back loaded. Does that show up?It shows in hours rather than miles. On a Leon County distribution run half of every cycle is a return leg over 60 miles, and telling us so says more than the reading does.
- 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.
Why people call
Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A distribution contract that ended and left one box truck too many standing in Leon County, 60 miles from the pits whose product it used to carry.
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.