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

The rail yard filed here is called Boston North, it is recorded under the Springfield Terminal Railway, and its coordinate sits 1.53 miles from the middle of this city. There is a second yard, also called Boston North, 0.24 miles east of it, recorded under the Bay Transportation Authority.

Two rows under different carriers are two facilities rather than one row entered twice, which is the ordinary explanation and is not the one that fits here. So a quarter of a mile of Middlesex County holds two working yards answering to the same name and to different railroads, and a driver told to report to Boston North has a question to ask before setting off.

Those two rows are also crossed. The one filed at Boston has its coordinate inside this city; the one filed here is attached by nearest-place fallback rather than by falling inside the place at all. The names and the filings have been swapped between two municipalities that share a border.

It is not an isolated slip. Four rail-yard rows in the Boston area are attached to a municipality other than the one containing their coordinate, and the errors run in both directions — one row filed at Boston belongs here, while two filed at Cambridge belong to Boston. The row filed at Boston sits 3.88 miles from that city’s centre and inside this one. All four containing places hold pages of their own, so nothing is lost, but the file cannot be read as a statement of which city a yard is in.

The coordinates themselves are worth stating plainly rather than trusting. Each is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point, and all 2,459 rail-yard rows in this research carry that same derivation. It puts a yard on the right stretch of track, not at a gate.

Those carriers are not both freight operators. One of the pair is recorded under the Bay Transportation Authority, which runs passenger and commuter services, and an exhaustive review of the 293 distinct carrier values in this layer finds 54 rows in the same position — revising two earlier counts of 33 and 41.

Freight reasoning does not transfer to a passenger operator, so nothing is claimed here about tonnage through either yard. The road work is a different question and does not depend on the answer. A rail yard of any kind needs ballast, ties, rail, plant and spoil moved in and out, and that is dump and flatbed work whoever owns the track.

What either Boston North yard actually handles could not be determined from any source read for this research. That is recorded as not found rather than as nothing moving.

Both yards sit on city streets rather than at an interstate ramp, which is where the Massachusetts figures start to bite.

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. That two-axle allowance is the highest recorded across thirty-one batches of this research — against Pennsylvania’s 38,000 lb on the same configuration — and 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. It is 10 per cent under the national figure and 20 per cent under the regional one, and short-coupled axle groups are exactly what a dense load encourages.

M.G.L. c. 90 § 19A. Information, not legal advice.

Those weight rules land differently at this density. This is a small, tightly built city inside the inner ring of Greater Boston, and the equipment is sized to it: box trucks and straight trucks on the retail and restaurant runs, tri-axle dumps and rollbacks off construction and demolition, service bodies and pickups on the trades.

It is also why a truck comes off the road here for reasons that have nothing to do with the truck. A yard gets built on — and the two Boston North yards, 0.24 miles apart, sit on land of exactly the kind that gets built on — or a contract moves out to a cheaper municipality, or a lease ends. The equipment is fine and there is nowhere left to park it.

None of that reaches the title, and the title 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 are the trucks we see from this corner of Middlesex County, where the Springfield Terminal Railway yard sits 1.53 miles from the centre. Box trucks and straight trucks off distribution and food service, day cabs on short shuttle runs, tri-axle dumps and rollbacks off construction and demolition, plus flatbeds, service bodies and pickups off the trades.

Access is the thing worth telling us first. A truck parked behind a triple-decker on a street with no turning circle is a different collection from one standing in a yard, and knowing that up front is what stops a wasted trip. 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.
• Can you get a truck out of my street?Usually, and if not we will say so rather than turn up and find out. Tell us the street and whether there is a hydrant, a permit zone or a low wire, and we plan for it.
• It has sat since the last job. Is that a problem?No. Tell us roughly how long and whether it has been outside, because that changes how we plan the collection rather than whether we want it.
• 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. There is no total-loss percentage here, so a salvage brand means a formula was applied rather than a threshold crossed.
• Do you have to come out at all?No. We buy remotely and arrange the tow, which on a street with no room to work is often the easier way round.
• Which Boston North do you mean?Whichever one you work out of. Two yards a quarter of a mile apart carry that name, one under the Springfield Terminal Railway and one under the Bay Transportation Authority, and 0.24 miles is enough to matter when a truck is being collected.

Those access questions are usually the whole conversation. Beyond them the reasons are the ordinary ones — a retirement, an estate, a lease that ended, a business that moved out of the city and did not take the oldest truck with it.

It is worth saying plainly that a truck standing unused in a city built this tightly costs its owner something every month, and that is what puts most of these calls on the phone rather than anything wrong with the equipment. Around the Springfield Terminal Railway yard 1.53 miles from the centre, and the Bay Transportation Authority yard 0.24 miles beyond it, they turn up steadily.