We buy trucks in Bostic

A single record is filed to Bostic: a rail yard under CSX Transportation whose coordinate lies 1.66 miles from the town centroid. It was attached here by nearest-centroid fallback rather than by falling inside the place, which is a weaker match than most rows on this site get.

The coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point, and all 2,459 rail-yard rows in our data were derived the same way. So 1.66 miles locates a stretch of track and not a gate.

What moves through it could not be determined from any source read for this batch. The row also carries a 75 miles radius, and that figure is a slice-wide constant flagged as estimated rather than a measurement of this yard’s catchment, so this page will not present it as one.

That leaves no ten-mile bridge count on this page, because those are computed around quarry nodes and there is no quarry filed here. It is an absence in what we looked up rather than a fact about the roads.

What can be said is statewide and it is measured: North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all. The state took over the county road systems in the 1930s and never handed them back, so of 19,343 structures in the federal inventory, 17,871 are state-maintained and not one is county-maintained. A ten-mile count is the only local measure that exists anywhere in this state, and here there is nothing to centre one on.

A yard 1.66 miles from the middle of a small town, an estimated 75 miles of notional catchment on the row, and no more than that. Padding it out would not make the page more use to anybody selling a truck.

So the things that do bear on a truck in Bostic are in the statute rather than in that row.

N.C.G.S. section 20-118 sets 20,000 lb on a single axle and 38,000 lb on a tandem, with gross weight varying by axle-group distance up to 80,000 lb. The tandem figure is the one to notice. Every other state we have read carries 34,000 lb there, so North Carolina allows four thousand pounds more on a tandem than Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania. On a dense load that is the limb that binds, which makes an identical 80,000 lb ceiling mean more here than it does elsewhere.

The same section grants a ten per cent tolerance on axle-group weights, and then writes down exactly what the tolerance does not reach: not the single-axle limit, not the tandem limit, not the 80,000 lb gross, not a posted bridge, and not the interstate system. It adds that no tolerance on those axle figures shall be granted administratively or otherwise. So it attaches to the axle-group table and to nothing else.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it. A vehicle carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market is outside the weight limits within 150 miles of the point of origination.

N.C.G.S. § 20-118. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the statute was last read for this batch.

One narrower provision is useful to know if a weigh station goes badly. A shifting-load provision gives relief on certain violations where the single-axle weight does not exceed the posted limit by more than 2,500 lb — a recognition that a load can move in transit without anybody having overloaded anything. It is specific to particular violations rather than general, and it is the sort of thing to ask about rather than assume.

Beyond the weight table, the paperwork comes down to that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary, and neither stops a sale.

Two North Carolina rules are drafted differently enough from the rest to matter here. The state brands a vehicle salvage where the cost of repairs, parts and labour, exceeds seventy-five per cent of its fair retail market value — and it applies that test whether or not an insurer has declared a total loss. Several states make an insurer’s decision a route into the definition. North Carolina writes the insurer out of it.

The second is a six-year line, and it decides the process rather than the test. A vehicle up to and including six model years old goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Division’s Enforcement Section before it can be retitled. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection, and the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the seventy-five per cent sum. The same repair bill therefore counts against a five-year-old truck and not against a seven-year-old one.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

Those rules apply to every truck on the list, and the list runs a great deal longer than one rail row 1.66 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them, and every one of them loads under the same 80,000 lb ceiling.

• 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.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• 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’s a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.
• There is not much here. Are you interested anyway?Yes. We hold one row for this town — a yard 1.66 miles out whose traffic we could not establish — and how much data we have about a place has never decided whether we buy a truck parked in it.
• Small town, and you are not nearby. How does this work?Usually without a visit: we buy it remotely and arrange the tow. We also come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and you can bring it to us if that is easier. None of it turns on the 75 miles somebody wrote on a row as an estimate.

That second question is the one small towns ask first, and behind it the reasons have nothing to do with a yard 1.66 miles up the road or an estimated 75 miles of catchment.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes the truck is simply sitting, and every month it sits is another month of insurance 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.