We buy trucks in Tampa

Five rail yards are filed under Tampa — Port Sutton, Port Tampa, Rockport, Uceta and Yeoman — and they are the seaward end of an inland industry. The phosphate district lies 30 to 40 miles east, and its finished product leaves through Port Sutton and Port Tampa.

The inbound leg is the half people forget. Fuel, ammonia and sulphur move the other way to the same plants. Volumes at the five yards were not determined, so this describes what moves rather than how much of it.

One correction while we are here: the Rockport coordinate falls inside Palm River-Clair Mel, which has a page of its own, while the row is attached to Tampa. We would rather say so than move the pin.

So the wear story here is chemistry rather than weather, and it is worth separating from the ordinary coastal one.

Four things stack on the same metal: acid chemistry off the Bone Valley phosphate trade, ambient marine salt, Florida humidity, and sulphur and fertilizer dust that holds moisture against a surface instead of letting it dry. What Tampa does not have is road salt. Nobody grits a road here.

The practical effect is that on anything that has worked Port Sutton the underside and the frame come first on an inspection — the same as on any coast, but for a different reason and often further along. A wash-down history is genuinely worth telling us about.

Which is true of the two rows here that have nothing to do with the water either. The Tampa Cement Grinding Plant works cement with 42 people, operator of record Quikrete Construction Materials. Ardent Mills runs a flour mill in the same county.

Site capacity, throughput and shipping mode were not established at the mill, and we are not going to estimate them. There is a tempting inference on offer about subtropical heat working cooling systems and batteries harder than a temperate climate does — and it is an inference, so it is not on this page as a fact.

Both sites are short-radius distribution rather than line-haul, which is the pattern almost everything in this metro follows.

Both of those trades run short and local, which is exactly where Florida’s weight rule pays.

FDOT may permit ten per cent over legal gross weight, off the interstate system only. A truck running plant to port on state and county roads has the whole of that; the same truck on I-4 or I-275 has none of it. And the permit does not reach single-unit dump trucks, mixers, waste vehicles or fuel tankers, which Florida caps at 70,000 lb gross in their own right.

Fla. Stat. § 316.550(4), with § 316.535(6). 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.

Where an insurer has paid a total loss, an electronic lien recorded on the title is the thing that actually holds it up.

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

All of that iron is iron we buy. Tankers off the fuel and ammonia end of the port work at Port Sutton. Day cabs and road tractors off the yards. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, service bodies, rollbacks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew in Hillsborough County.

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.
• The frame has taken years of fertilizer dust. Does that end it?No. It is what we expect on a truck that has worked the Port Sutton end of this trade, with Bone Valley chemistry on it the whole time, and it is the first thing we look at rather than the last word on it.
• It hauled ammonia. Is that a problem?No. Tell us what it carried so nobody is surprised, and note that a tank is usually a separate asset with its own inspection history.
• 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 haulage contract that ended and left one tractor too many parked in Hillsborough County, at the Port Sutton end of a run that had been steady for years.

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.