We buy trucks in Goldsboro

The single record filed here is Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, whose coordinate reverse-geocodes to Wayne County. That is very nearly all our data holds about it.

Acreage, strength and mission were not established, and the row is recorded as thin. There is no freight information in it at all — no commodities, no traffic, no gate count.

A large installation next to a city of this size plainly generates truck movements, and we are not going to describe them, because describing them would mean inventing them. What the row establishes is a name and a location in Wayne County, and this page will not stretch it further.

It leaves no ten-mile bridge count, because those are computed around quarry nodes and there is no quarry filed here. That 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 none is county-maintained, and 9.3% of the state-maintained ones are rated below legal loads.

None of that is about Wayne County in particular, and this page will not dress it up as though it were. It is the floor everywhere in the state, and the floor is what a page with one thin row can honestly stand on.

So the rules that do bear on a truck in Goldsboro are the state’s, and they apply on every road in it.

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.

Beyond the weight rules, 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 wider than one thin installation row in Wayne County. 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.
• It ran contract work on and off the base. Does that need special paperwork?Not for a sale. If there are inspection or access records with the truck we would rather see them than guess, and not having them does not stop anything. Anything based in Wayne County loads under the same 80,000 lb ceiling as anything else.
• Posted out and the truck cannot come with me. How fast can this go?We will not put a clock on it, because a promise we might miss is no use to somebody packing. What we can say is that none of the ways this happens needs you standing there for all of it — we buy remotely and arrange the tow when that suits.

That second question is asked around Wayne County more than in most places, and it points at the reason behind a lot of these calls.

A posting. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in a Wayne County yard, 2,500 lb under the limit or not. 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.