We buy trucks in Franklinton

The row filed here is Drowning Creek Dredge and Plant, a facility operation working industrial sand under Southern Products and Silica Company, with 30 employees. That is a working operation rather than a registration, and it is a different trade from the crushed stone most of this lane runs on.

A dredge lifts sand out of water rather than rock out of a face. The loading is different, the product is different, and the trucks either side of it do not wear the way a quarry tipper does.

One field on the row is wrong and should be named. The county string reads Richmond while the coordinate reverse-geocodes to Franklin County — and the city, Franklinton, is itself in Franklin County. So the city and the coordinate agree with each other and the county string is the outlier.

That pattern — city and coordinate agreeing, county field disagreeing — is the seventh instance recorded across this dataset. It is common enough to have a name and rare enough to deserve flagging each time.

The central cross-check flags this row and returns a verdict of unclassified review. It stays flagged rather than corrected, because the node list is read-only to us and rewriting a field on a hunch is how a small error becomes a confident one.

Nothing on this page depends on it. Drowning Creek is where its coordinate says it is, in Franklin County, 30 people work there, and none of that changes whichever string the county field happens to carry.

Sand loads under the same statute as stone, 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Sand haulers and bulk tippers off the Drowning Creek plant. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers on the stone work around it. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs out of Franklin County. 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.

• 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 hauled wet sand off a dredge, not stone. Different to you?Not to whether we buy it. Wet sand is heavier per load and harder on a body than dry aggregate, so we ask what it carried and how the body has held up. A Southern Products and Silica truck and a quarry tipper are both trucks we buy.
• Does somebody 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. Driving it to us is also fine, anywhere in Franklin County or well outside it.

Those two come up more than the rest in Franklin County, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a county string reading Richmond or with what Drowning Creek employs.

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.