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

Fifteen rail-yard rows carry this city’s name in the file we work from, and they sit close in — the nearest 2.98 miles from the middle of town, the furthest 6.59. Count the carriers and there are four. Conrail holds five rows, Canadian National five, CSX Transportation three and Norfolk Southern two.

Conrail is the one that surprises people. It was split between CSX and Norfolk Southern in 1999, but Conrail Shared Assets survived in three metropolitan areas and this is one of them — thirteen Michigan rail-yard rows carry it, across five cities. The name on the side of the locomotive is current, not a leftover.

What moves through any individual yard we could not establish from anything we read, so we are not going to characterise them. The count is the honest part.

Those fifteen rows are filed under Detroit, and six of them have coordinates that land inside a neighbouring municipality with a page of its own — Hamtramck, Ferndale, Warren and Dearborn. Two more, 0.14 miles apart under the same carrier with two letters of the same word transposed between their names, are plainly one facility written down twice.

That is better said out loud than quietly corrected, because it describes the place accurately. The industrial edge of this city does not stop at the city line, and neither does a working truck. If your yard is in Hamtramck or off Mound Road in Warren, you are in the same trucking geography and we buy there too.

Beyond the rail there is heavy industry inside the city limits. Two of the rows here are genuine vehicle assembly plants — the Detroit Assembly Complex and Detroit Hamtramck Assembly, now called Factory Zero. Statewide, ten of Michigan’s sixteen automotive rows are assembly plants and the other six make components.

St Marys Cement-Detroit is carried as a cement facility under operator St. Marys Cement, and reports 91 employees to the federal mine regulator. Waterfront Petroleum is a liquid bulk terminal on the river.

Between them those four points explain most of the truck population here without anybody having to guess. Assembly ramps move finished vehicles out on car haulers. A cement works runs mixers and bulk tankers. A petroleum terminal runs tankers of a different kind. And every one of them is served by day cabs doing short, heavy, repetitive local work.

All of that loads under a state rulebook that is not the one the rest of the country runs on. Michigan permits a maximum gross weight of 164,000 lb on a combination of up to eleven axles, which is the highest regularly usable truck weight in North America. Eleven has been the ceiling since 1967.

How it gets there is the part to understand. Michigan’s axle limits are lower than the federal ones — 18,000 lb on a single axle against a federal 20,000, and 32,000 lb on a tandem against 34,000. The state reaches a very high gross by allowing more axles each carrying less, not by allowing heavier axles, on the logic that pavement damage climbs with axle load rather than with gross weight.

So a Michigan-legal heavy combination is not a heavier version of an ordinary truck. It is a physically different vehicle with several trailing axle groups, and its axles will each have carried less than a federal-limit truck’s, over more of them. That is a fact about the truck rather than about the road, and it follows the truck when it is sold: one built for Michigan weights may not be configured for anywhere else, and one bought out of state may not run at them here. Tell us the axle count and we will know what we are looking at.

The same statute takes the advantage back every spring. Maximum axle and wheel loads are reduced through March, April and May — by 25 percent on concrete pavements and concrete-based roads, and by 35 percent on every other road type. Because the whole regime is built on the axle, that is a straight cut in what the truck can legally carry, and the eleven-axle advantage does not survive the thaw. The state and the county road commissions can start it early or lift it early on the weather. In the 2026 cycle it began in February, changed again on 30 March and came off through late April.

Gross and axle limits at MCL 257.722, read from the Michigan Vehicle Code and the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Maximum Legal Truck Loadings and Dimensions. Information, not legal advice.

That statute governs what the truck may carry. The paperwork is much shorter. We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Everything after that is a fix rather than a category: a lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

Michigan’s bridge postings, its storage and mechanic’s lien clock, plate return and its emissions programme were not established by the research behind this page, so none of them is stated here. Michigan has not adopted the Advanced Clean Trucks rule. If your situation turns on one of those, ask us and we will find out rather than guess at it.

Those rules cover trucks we are glad to buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the Conrail and Canadian National yards. Car haulers off the Assembly Complex ramps. Mixers and bulk tankers off St Marys Cement, tankers off Waterfront Petroleum, dump trucks off the demolition and the road work. Flatbeds, box trucks, straight trucks and rollbacks out of the trades, and the service bodies, work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

In a metro this size every way of collecting a truck is routine. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all. You are welcome to bring it to us instead if that suits you better.

• 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.
• It is an eleven-axle Michigan train.Then say so early. A Michigan-legal heavy combination is a different vehicle from an eighty-thousand-pound five-axle truck, and the axle count changes who it suits. It does not change whether we buy it.
• My yard is in Hamtramck, not Detroit.Same answer. Hamtramck, Ferndale, Warren, Dearborn and the rest of Wayne County are all ordinary for us, and the city line has never decided anything.
• It has done short heavy local runs for years.Then the odometer understates it, and we would rather hear that from you. A tractor shuttling between the Conrail Shared Assets yards and the Assembly Complex ramps puts its wear into brakes, frames and drivelines rather than into miles. You know better than we do what it has been through.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• 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 is a bonded route.

None of those questions is usually the reason for the call. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and never got replaced. A tandem standing off Mound Road since a job finished, or a tanker behind a fence near Waterfront Petroleum, with insurance going out every month on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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.