We buy trucks in Greensboro

Central Rock Quarry records 23 employees with the federal mine regulator and sits 7.27 miles from the city centroid. A second pit, Pomona, records 11 and sits 6.15 miles out. Both work the Piedmont’s crystalline rock, on the urban belt that runs from Charlotte through here and Winston-Salem to Burlington and Raleigh.

Then there are the rail rows, and they are both called Pomona too. One is recorded as Pomona at 2.36 miles from the centroid; the other as Pomona Intermodal at 2.70 miles. Both run under Norfolk Southern.

What either yard handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, and this page does not guess. The word on the end of the second name is a description of what a yard does, not a record of what came through it.

Those two rows are 0.34 miles apart under the same carrier, Norfolk Southern, which in most of our data would be enough to say one facility got written down twice.

It is not enough here. The rule we use for duplicate pairs turns on the suffix being a carrier tag or a facility number. Intermodal is neither — it is a function descriptor, and twenty-three rows across the wider dataset end in that same word. A rule that swallowed all of them would be collapsing real ramps into their parent yards on nothing but a shared word.

So it stays open. A seller does not care either way, and that is rather the point of saying it out loud: the count on this page is two rows, not two yards, and those are different claims.

Those pits sit on two overlapping circles that come out very differently, which is not what you would expect six miles apart.

One point seven per cent is the fourth-lowest restricted share we have measured in this state. Those caps are gross-weight ratings for the crossing rather than payload figures, and a legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty US tons, so even the most generous of them takes one 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.

There is a reason to spell this out beyond local interest. Ninety miles west, in Caldwell County, a portable plant registered onto a mountain quarry carries the name Greensboro Portable Plant. Its network is 14.3 per cent restricted with a cap around 17 US tons. This one is the network its name points at, and it is not the network it worked.

So a machine with Greensboro on the paperwork may have spent its life on either. The name is not the evidence; the coordinate is.

Both of those circles sit under one 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Central Rock Quarry and the Pomona pit. Day cabs and road tractors working the Norfolk Southern yard ends. 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.
• The plate says Greensboro but it worked out west. Does that matter to you?Not to what we pay attention to. It matters to how a truck reads on paper, which is why we ask where it actually ran rather than what the name on it says. Mountain hours and the Guilford County hours a Central Rock Quarry truck puts in are different hours.
• Do you need to come and see 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.

Those two questions come up more than the rest in Guilford County, and behind them the reasons are plainer than anything in the Central Rock Quarry bridge tables.

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.