We buy trucks in Kure Beach

Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point is recorded as the largest ammunition port in the nation and the Army’s primary east coast deep-water port, operated by the 597th Transportation Group on a 16,000-acre Army-owned site. Army reporting describes it as the world’s largest military terminal.

It is filed to Kure Beach and it is not in Kure Beach. Its coordinate lands in Brunswick County; Kure Beach is in New Hanover. The resolver reached for the nearest place by straight line and crossed the Cape Fear River to get there, which is a distance no truck can drive.

That is the thing to hold on to about this page. The terminal is real, it is close as the crow flies, and the road between here and there is not short.

Those acres are not what they sound like. An ammunition terminal is mostly separation distance — the land exists to put space between things that must not be near each other — so the site is largely buffer, and the constrained parts are the rail and road approaches rather than the ground itself.

There is a rail row to match: Sunny Point, 4.57 miles from the Kure Beach centroid, with its carrier recorded as the United States Government. It is one of sixteen rows across twelve states carrying that value, and its coordinate falls in no incorporated place at all, so it was attached to this city by nearest-centroid fallback rather than by sitting inside it. What moves through it could not be determined from any source read for this batch.

Explosives routing and parking rules were not researched for this batch and nothing about them is asserted here. They are the most useful unanswered question on this page, and saying so is better than filling the space with something that sounds right.

It is the Blakeslee Air Force Recreation Area, and it reverse-geocodes to New Hanover County. It arrives under the heading of military installations because that is the layer it came from — the third recreation facility to turn up that way across the wider dataset, which makes it a pattern rather than a one-off.

Nothing about freight follows from it. No load moves through a recreation area, and a page that counted it as a base would be inventing traffic out of a filing category.

So the rules that do bear on a truck here 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, and it is the sort of thing to ask about rather than assume.

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 wider than anything filed around the Cape Fear, including the rail row 4.57 miles from here. 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.

If a truck ran the terminal, its cargo-tied inspection, routing and driver-qualification records go with it, and we will ask about them. They are part of what the machine has done, in the same way the hour meter is.

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 for the terminal. Do you want the paperwork?Yes, if you have it. Inspection, routing and driver-qualification records are part of a truck’s history and we would rather see them than guess. Not having them does not stop a sale.
• I am down the beach and you are not. How does this work?Usually without anybody driving anywhere: we buy it remotely and arrange the tow. The Sunny Point row is 4.57 miles from here as the crow flies and a good deal further by road, which is rather the point. We also come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and you can bring it to us if that is easier.

That second question is the common one on this side of the Cape Fear and across New Hanover County, and the reasons behind it are the same as everywhere else.

Retiring. A posting. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one tractor too many. 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.