We buy trucks in Charlotte

Charlotte sits in the Piedmont urban crescent, the belt of cities running north-east through Greensboro and Winston-Salem to Burlington and Raleigh, where about two thirds of the state lives. The rock underneath is crystalline — granite, gneiss, schist and diabase of the Carolina terrane — and the quarries sit inside or beside the metropolitan area they supply rather than out in the country.

The federal mine regulator records 32 employees at Pineville, 27 at Arrowood, 26 at Charlotte Quarry, 13 at Mallard Creek and 12 at Clear Creek. The rail rows run under two carriers: Charlotte yard 2.15 miles out and Charlotte Regional Intermodal 7.39 miles out under Norfolk Southern, with Charlotte Transflo 7.13 miles out and the Pinoca pair around five and a half miles out under CSX Transportation. There is a flour mill here too, run by the Adm Milling Company.

What moves through any of those yards could not be determined from any source read for this batch, so this page does not put words in them.

Two of those rows are the same place. Pinoca and Pinocca lie 0.13 miles apart under the same carrier, and one name is the other with a doubled letter. A same-carrier pair at that distance whose names differ by a single character is one facility written down twice, and that is how we read it.

The Charlotte Regional Intermodal row is the one that would normally carry the most weight for a truck page, because an intermodal ramp means drayage — pull a box off the ramp, run it to a warehouse, come back. We are not asserting that here. The name is suggestive and the traffic was not established, and those are two different things.

That caution applies harder to Denver Quarry. It is filed to Charlotte and its coordinate is 21.61 miles away, in Lincoln County, which both the county field and an independent geocode confirm.

Denver is a real town in Lincoln County, and the quarry’s own name is Denver Quarry — so the name backs the coordinate and the city label is the single field that is wrong. One small tell came with it: the city value on that row is written in lower case where every other city value in the batch is capitalised, which suggests it entered the list by a different route. We record the observation and not a cause.

It stays on the page because a seller near Denver is a seller we buy from. It is flagged because a page that silently places a Lincoln County pit in Charlotte is a page telling somebody the wrong thing about their own drive.

Those pits sit on more bridges than anywhere else we have measured here, and it turns out not to constrain them.

Five hundred and fifty-one structures inside ten miles is the densest network we have measured in North Carolina, though several Missouri and Oklahoma rows run denser still. Twenty-three of them are posted for load and twenty-one are rated below legal loads, a ninety-one per cent overlap that matches the state pattern and looks nothing like Tennessee’s.

Those caps are gross-weight ratings for the crossing, not payload figures. A legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty US tons, so the tightest useful crossing near Charlotte Quarry — about twenty — takes it only part loaded. How often such a crossing falls on a route anybody actually drives depends on where the loads go, and the data does not say. What the data does say is that they are sparse: twenty-one out of 551, none of them nearer than two and a half miles.

Two of those circles run over a state line. The ten-mile radius around Arrowood picks up 325 structures in North Carolina and 51 in South Carolina; around Pineville it is 410 and 32. Both counts are computed from every state file with structures inside the radius rather than from North Carolina’s alone, because a truck does not stop at the line and neither should the arithmetic.

Both sides of that line have their own statute, and this is the one that governs here.

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.

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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the five working pits — Pineville, Arrowood, Charlotte Quarry, Mallard Creek and Clear Creek. Day cabs and road tractors off the ramps. Box trucks and straight trucks on the warehouse end of the same run. Flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.

The mill adds one more, and a legal wrinkle with it. A flour mill is a processing plant for the purposes of section 20-118, so a grain truck delivering into it is inside that 150-mile exemption if the farm it loaded at is within the radius. Whether a given load qualifies is a question about where it started, which is a thing a driver knows and a page cannot.

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

• 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.
• It is a city tractor with hard hours and low miles. Still interested?Yes. Short repeated runs into Charlotte traffic wear the brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres ahead of the engine, and the queue time never reaches the odometer. That is the ordinary shape of a truck here, not a fault.
• I am out toward Denver or over in South Carolina. Still your patch?Yes. We buy across the state and the rest of the country, and it does not have to involve a visit — we buy remotely and arrange the tow when that is the sensible way round.

Those last two get asked more than the rest, and behind them the reasons are plainer than anything in the Mecklenburg County figures or the Mallard Creek bridge count.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A lease that ended and left one tractor 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.