Sell your semi truck for cash in Boston the easy and convenient way

Three separate marine operations are filed to this city and they sit inside a mile of one another. The petroleum port, operated by the Port Authority’s maritime department, is recorded as operational; the roll-on roll-off car terminal known as the Autoport, under the same authority, is 0.42 miles south-west of it; and a liquid bulk terminal sits 1.08 miles east.

Each of those three implies a different truck at the gate, which is why the distinction is worth keeping. A roll-on roll-off car terminal is served by car haulers and nothing else does the job; a petroleum berth and a liquid bulk terminal are served by road tankers; and all three generate ordinary flatbed, box and day-cab traffic on top of that.

The city is separately recorded as a principal port of the coastal class. That record is a polygon covering a wide port area and its centre point is indicative only, so it locates the port rather than any berth in it.

Those terminals run right up to a boundary that does not follow the working geography. The petroleum port here and the Chelsea terminals are about 300 feet apart and are assigned to two different municipalities, because the municipal line runs through the terminal district on Chelsea Creek.

Both assignments may well be defensible, and no verdict is offered on which is right. What is worth knowing is that the ordinary duplicate check does not fire on the pair, because the two rows carry different operators — so a reader counting terminals from the file would count two where a driver would see one district.

It is the same shape recorded at Albany, at Cincinnati and in the South Bronx: a port district split by a line that the trucks working it cross without noticing.

All of that traffic answers to one inspection regime, and the Commonwealth’s carries an oddity worth knowing.

Every vehicle registered here takes a safety inspection each year, and commercial motor vehicles, trailers and converter dollies fall additionally under the Commonwealth’s Commercial Motor Vehicle Inspection. 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. Across thirty-one batches of this research it is the only state inspection found to discharge a federal obligation outright.

Emissions do not reach this trade at all: the programme applies where a commercial vehicle has a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,001 lb or less, which is under everything on this page. A repaired salvage vehicle is a separate matter. It must pass a salvage inspection run by the State Police at five locations before it can be registered, and that inspection verifies identity and records every major component part replaced. It is expressly not a safety inspection, so passing it says nothing about whether the truck is roadworthy.

M.G.L. c. 90 § 7A; Massachusetts salvage inspection programme. Information, not legal advice.

Those marine rows are not the only ones attached here. A rail yard called Boston North is filed to this city under the Bay Transportation Authority, with its coordinate 3.88 miles from the centre — and inside Somerville, which holds a page of its own.

It is one of four rail-yard rows in this area attached to a municipality other than the one containing their coordinate, and the errors run both ways: two rows filed at Cambridge belong here. There is also a second yard of the same name 0.24 miles away under a different carrier, so the name alone does not identify a facility.

The carrier on this one is a passenger and commuter operator rather than a freight railroad, one of 54 such rows found across the 293 distinct carrier values in this layer, so no freight claim is made about it here.

The paperwork is more settled than the boundaries, and it is where most sales actually stall.

There is no statutory total-loss percentage here. 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.

Two things follow from that for a truck rather than for a car. Scrap value is a large fraction of a truck’s worth and a small fraction of a car’s, so a formula reaches the total-loss line at a lower repair figure than a fixed percentage does, and the gap widens as the vehicle gets heavier. And 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.

M.G.L. c. 90D § 1. Information, not legal advice.

Those three marine functions set the mix more than anything else does. Car haulers off the Autoport 0.42 miles from the petroleum berth, road tankers off the petroleum and liquid bulk terminals, day cabs and road tractors on the short drayage runs, plus box trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks and pickups off everything else the city runs on.

A car hauler is worth describing properly — deck count, hydraulics and ramp condition matter more than mileage on that equipment, and the same goes for a tanker’s last load and its test dates, whether it works the berth here or the Chelsea Creek side 300 feet over the line. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

• 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.
• It is a car hauler off the Autoport. Do you take those?Yes. Tell us the deck count and the condition of the hydraulics and ramps, because on that equipment they matter more than the odometer does.
• It is a tanker. Anything special?The last product and the test dates. The petroleum berth and the liquid bulk terminal 1.08 miles from it both run road tankers and we see plenty of them.
• My yard is technically in Chelsea. Does that matter?No. The municipal line runs through the terminal district and the two sides are about 300 feet apart; we work both.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost has a counter replacement; a lien needs the release.

Those port contracts are the most common reason a group of trucks comes off at once. Terminal work runs on terms, and when a term ends the equipment specified for it goes together.

Beyond that the ordinary set — retirements, estates, redevelopment of a yard, and the truck that has stood since the last job it was needed for. Between the car terminal 0.42 miles one way, the liquid bulk terminal 1.08 miles the other and the Chelsea Creek district beyond it, they come up steadily.