Twenty-seven at Greystone, on a network that reads western
The row filed here is Greystone, and MSHA records 27 employees at it. Its coordinate lands 4.21 miles from the centroid of Henderson city.
The ten-mile circle around it holds 90 structures, which is a thin network for this half of the state, and 13 of them are rated below legal loads. That is 14.4%, against 3.8% across the crescent pits to the south.
The nearest of the 13 is 2.50 miles from the pit. One is rated below the level at which any commercial vehicle crosses at all; the tightest a loaded truck could use is about 20.9 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, so it takes a tandem carrying about eight tonnes of stone rather than twenty-five.
The border tier is twice as restricted as the counties below it
That reading is not particular to this pit. Within the flat eastern half of the state the variation runs north to south rather than east to west, and this row sits in the northern tier of it.
The tier along the Virginia line — Caswell, Rockingham, Person, Granville, Vance and Durham — runs 68 of 660 nearby structures below legal loads, 10.3%, with a median cap admitting about 7.6 tonnes of stone. The coastal plain edge fifty miles south runs 5.0% and the central Piedmont 4.0%. So the border tier is twice as restricted as the counties below it, and about as restricted as the western Piedmont three hundred miles away.
What that leaves is an operator working a network that looks western on the restriction measure and eastern on everything else — flat country and open hauls, with more soft crossings on the route map than the geography suggests. Read on a used machine it means the loads were often partial and the routes often longer than the map implies. We take that as background rather than as a verdict on any one truck.
North Carolina weight law
Thirty-eight thousand on a tandem, and a tolerance that stops at the axle
Those crossings are the local ceiling. The statutory one is the same in every county, 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.
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.
North Carolina paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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 runs the opposite way from the states either side of it. For a vehicle up to and including six model years old the test is a straight seventy-five per cent. For one more than six model years old the same test applies, but the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the repair figure — so the older truck gets the narrower basis and is branded less readily, where Missouri and Tennessee simply switch the rule off past a certain age.
N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the pit 4.21 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs north and south. 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.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Henderson
- 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.
- Half its work was over the Virginia line. Does that complicate the sale?No. Where a truck worked has no bearing on the paperwork; the title does. The state line shows up on this page only in the road figures, and those describe the routes rather than the machine.
- Is a network like this hard on a truck?Harder than the map suggests, which is the honest answer. 13 of the 90 structures within ten miles of the pit are rated below legal loads, the pit itself sits 4.21 miles from the middle of town and the nearest soft crossing is 2.50 miles from it, so route choice mattered here in a way it does not fifty miles south. That is background, not a condition.
- 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.
Why people call
Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 4.21 miles out or a crossing 2.50 miles from it.
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.