Massachusetts runs freight through Boston and out along the rail. The port at Boston handles roll-on/roll-off cargo, and petroleum terminals work at Boston, Salem, Gloucester, New Bedford and Somerset with liquid-bulk terminals at Chelsea and Quincy.
An International box truck out of Boston, a Freightliner day cab off a Worcester ramp, a Mack roll-off near Chelsea or a Ford dually out of Springfield all get the same treatment: photos and details come to us, an offer goes back, and from there we can collect it, buy it remotely, or you can drive it to us.
Massachusetts’s trucking industry is a dense Northeast market with strong freight demand driven by its major port, manufacturing, and distribution sectors.
Massachusetts inspections
One inspection that discharges two obligations
All of it answers to the same inspection regime, and the Commonwealth’s does something unusual with it. The federal regulator has approved that inspection as equivalent to the annual federal one, so a commercial vehicle or trailer that passes it is not required to obtain a separate federal inspection. A repaired salvage vehicle is a separate matter.
90 § 7A; Massachusetts salvage inspection programme.
The axle figure, not the gross one
Bulk flour and containers are both dense enough that the axle limits arrive before the gross one does. Under M.G.L. c. 90 § 19A a vehicle of three or more axles may travel a public way without a permit at up to 80,000 lb with its load, and a two-axle truck at up to 46,000 lb. Pennsylvania’s figure on the same configuration is 38,000 lb. A two-axle truck is exactly what does local delivery, refuse, dump and utility work without ever seeing an interstate. The catch sits one line further down. No axle may carry more than 22,400 lb, and where axles are spaced less than six feet apart that drops to 18,000 lb. New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and New Hampshire all set the same 22,400 lb single-axle figure against a federal 20,000, so the region is consistent; the short-spacing cut is the part that is not.
90 § 19A.
Massachusetts emissions rules
A rule aimed at manufacturers, not at you
The Commonwealth has adopted the Advanced Clean Trucks rule under Clean Air Act § 177, the provision that lets a state take California’s vehicle standards in place of the federal ones. Nothing in it makes a truck already on the road harder to sell.
Clean Air Act § 177; Advanced Clean Trucks.
A formula, with no percentage in it anywhere
The paperwork is more settled than the boundaries, and it is where most sales actually stall. Under M.G.L. c. 90D § 1 a total loss salvage motor vehicle is one stolen and unrecovered, or wrecked, destroyed or damaged to such an extent that the owner — or the insurer, where the vehicle is insured — considers it uneconomical to repair. The working test applied is repair and labour cost plus the vehicle’s value as scrap, measured against its value before the loss. The seventy-five per cent figure that circulates is an insurer’s internal guideline rather than the Commonwealth’s rule — anyone told their truck is a total loss at seventy-five per cent has been quoted a practice, not a law.
90D § 1.