We buy trucks in Durham

Durham carries two rail-yard rows and they sit close together. The one recorded as Durham runs under CSX Transportation, 0.90 miles from the city centroid. East Durham runs under Norfolk Southern, 2.23 miles out. Both are inside the place.

What either of them handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, so this page does not say. The coordinates themselves are the mean of a track polyline rather than a surveyed point, which is how every rail-yard row in the data was derived, so treat them as locating track rather than a gate.

Those two names are the same name with a directional prefix on one of them, which is usually the signature of a single facility written down twice — and at 0.90 miles and 2.23 miles from the centroid they are close enough to look like it. We have a rule for that shape and we are not applying it here.

The reason is the carrier field. Where a duplicate pair sits under the SAME operator a mile or so apart, the rule calls it one place recorded twice, and it has been reliable. These two sit under different carriers, and the rule has never been tested on a different-carrier pair. So it stays unresolved rather than being decided by a rule reaching past what it was built for.

For anybody selling a truck this changes nothing, which is rather the point. It is only stated because a page that quietly rounds two rows into one is a page making a claim it cannot support.

It is the Army Research Office, and it lands in our data under the heading of military installations because that is the layer it came from. It is the Army’s extramural basic-research funding organisation — not a yard under CSX or Norfolk Southern, and not a freight site of any kind.

Nothing about trucks follows from it. No freight moves through a grant-making office, and a page that read it as a base would be inventing a fleet out of a filing category. So it sits here as a correction and nowhere else on the page.

So what is left to govern a truck in Durham is the statute, and it is more generous on the open road than any other we hold on file.

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.

Those rules cover everything we buy, and that covers most of what runs through a city this size. Day cabs and road tractors off both yard ends, 0.90 and 2.23 miles out under CSX and Norfolk Southern. Box trucks and straight trucks doing the warehouse and delivery work. Flatbeds, dump trucks, 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.

• 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 truck — low miles, hard hours. Still interested?Yes. Short runs and a lot of stop-start put the wear into brakes, clutch and suspension long before the engine, and the odometer never records the idling. On a city where both yards sit within 2.23 miles of the centre, that is simply the shape of the work. Tell us the hours if the machine tracks them.
• Do you have to come out to it?No. 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. Driving it to us is also fine.

Those questions come up in that order most weeks, and none of them is really about the Army Research Office or about which carrier holds the yard 0.90 miles from the centre. The reasons behind them are plainer.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A lease that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes it is that the truck has been parked since the last contract, 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.