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

Three operations are filed to this city and all three sit on or near the water. A flour mill run by the Bay State Milling Company is one; a liquid bulk terminal operated by Sprague Energy on Washington Street is 2.44 miles east of it; and the rail yard at the Fore River shipyard is 0.47 miles south-west of the terminal.

Each of the three puts a different truck at its gate. A flour mill runs pneumatic bulk tankers and box trailers, grain in and flour out, to a schedule rather than a season. A liquid bulk terminal runs road tankers. A shipyard rail head runs flatbeds and heavy haul. Between them they cover most of what a working waterfront asks of road transport.

The rail yard’s carrier is the Fore River Transportation Corporation, named for the same site, which makes it a rail-to-water node rather than a through yard. Whether shipbuilding continues there was not determined and nothing is claimed about it.

That mill is worth a second look, because it is the company’s headquarters as well as one of its sites. The Bay State Milling Company is named for the Commonwealth itself, and this is the place it is run from — the single site in twelve across this research where a company-level figure might reasonably have been attached to a place.

It was not. No site-level production or employment figure was obtainable for it, which is a property of the operator’s publishing habits rather than of the mill, and none is invented here. What can be said is what a mill of any size guarantees: bulk road traffic in both directions, every working day, out onto the same roads that serve the fuel terminal 2.44 miles east and the shipyard yard 0.47 miles beyond it.

The grains recorded for this site are oat and wheat. That is two where 142 of the 156 mills carrying a grain at all record only one, so the site is better described than most even though its output is not described at all.

All three gates load dense product, and that is where the axle numbers across this region start to matter.

M.G.L. c. 90 § 19A caps a single axle at 22,400 lb rather than the federal 20,000. So do New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine — six states, one number, and 22,400 lb is ten metric tonnes almost exactly. Vermont is the gap in that reading rather than an exception to it: its axle limits sit in a section that was not read, and it is recorded as unknown.

Which matters more than the gross figure does, because gross is 80,000 lb across the whole group and tells you nothing. A dense load — stone, sand, cement, scrap — reaches its axle limits with the body far from full, so the gross allowance goes unused and 12 per cent more axle is 12 per cent more payload. Massachusetts then cuts the other way for axles spaced under six feet, which drop to 18,000 lb, and a short-coupled tri-axle is what a dense load encourages. Two neighbouring states, opposite incentives, the same truck.

M.G.L. c. 90 § 19A; 29-A M.R.S. § 2353; RSA 266:18-b; N.J.S.A. 39:3-84. Information, not legal advice.

Those three sites sit in a city that reads as a suburb and works as a port. This is Norfolk County frontage on the harbour’s south side, close enough to Boston that the commuter traffic dominates the roads and far enough that the industry has kept its ground.

It is why the fleet here spans two worlds at once. Tankers and heavy haul off the water — the Sprague Energy terminal and the Fore River Transportation yard 0.47 miles apart — and box trucks, work trucks, service bodies and pickups off the trades and services that a dense residential city runs on.

None of that reaches the paperwork, which is the same everywhere in the Commonwealth and is where most sales 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 gates set the mix, from the Bay State Milling site to the Sprague Energy terminal 2.44 miles east and the shipyard yard 0.47 miles beyond it. Road tankers off the fuel and the flour, day cabs and road tractors on the short runs, flatbeds off the yard, plus box trucks, work trucks and pickups.

On a tanker the last product and the test dates matter more than the odometer, and on anything that has worked salt air the frame and the brake lines are the first things to look at. Tell us what it carried. 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 pneumatic tanker off the mill. Do you take those?Yes. Tell us the blower hours as well as the miles and what it last carried, because on that equipment the residue and the hours matter.
• It has been on the salt water its whole life. Is that a problem?Not by itself, and we expect it here. Say so up front and we will look at the frame and the lines rather than be surprised by them.
• 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.
• Can you get into the terminal area?Usually, but tell us first. The Sprague Energy terminal and the shipyard yard 0.47 miles from it both sit behind gates, and access is easier arranged than discovered.

Those waterfront leases are the reason more often than anything mechanical. Ground on the harbour gets redeveloped, and when it does the equipment standing on it needs somewhere to go.

Beyond that the ordinary set — retirements, estates, and the truck that has stood since the last job it was needed for. Between the Bay State Milling site and the Sprague Energy terminal 2.44 miles east of it, they come up steadily.