We buy trucks in Fayetteville

There is a single industrial record filed to Fayetteville in our data, and it is a rail yard called Milan. It runs under CSX Transportation, and its coordinate lies 5.81 miles from the city centroid, inside the place. It is the only rail-yard row attached to Fayetteville anywhere in the list.

The coordinate deserves one caveat before anybody leans on it. It is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point, and all 2,459 rail-yard rows in our data were derived the same way. So 5.81 miles locates a stretch of track. It does not locate a gate, and a yard is longer than it is wide.

The row also carries a 75 miles radius. That figure is a constant applied across every rail-yard row in the data and flagged as estimated, so it is not a measurement of this yard’s catchment and this page will not present it as one.

That is the whole of the record. What commodities move through Milan could not be determined from any source read for this batch.

It would be easy to fill that in. A rail yard under a Class I carrier on the edge of a city of this size suggests a story, and the story would write itself. We are not going to write it, because a gap in what we looked up is not a fact about the place — and a page that guesses at freight is a page that will tell somebody their truck is the wrong kind.

No bridge figures appear on this page, because there is no quarry node here to draw a ten-mile circle around. What can be said is statewide, and it is measured: North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all, 92.4% of its structures are state-maintained, and 9.3% of those are rated below legal loads. None of that is about this city in particular, and this page will not dress it up as though it were.

So the thing that actually governs a truck in Fayetteville is not in that row at all. It is in the statute, and it applies the same way on every road in the state.

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 apply to every truck we buy, and the list runs a good deal longer than the one record we hold for this town. Day cabs and road tractors. Box trucks and straight trucks. 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, and every one of them loads under the same 80,000 lb ceiling. We do not need to know what moves through a yard 5.81 miles up the road to know that.

• 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.
• Do you have to come and look at it?Not necessarily. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow without anyone visiting. You can also drive it to us. Which one happens is whatever suits you.
• It has been parked for two years. Is that a problem?No. Seals dry out, batteries flatten and air systems weep on a truck that sits, and none of that surprises us. It does need to be complete. A truck parked within 2 miles of the Milan yard and one parked 30 miles out in the county are the same proposition to us.

Both of those last two questions come up more than any of the others, and the reason is usually the same one — which has nothing to do with the 5.81 miles between here and a rail yard, or the 75 miles somebody wrote on the row as an estimate.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one tractor too many. Sometimes the truck is just 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.