We buy trucks in Marshall

The row filed here is the Mc Crary Madison Quarry, with 13 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 2.28 miles from the centroid of Marshall town.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 174 structures and 30 of them are rated below legal loads — 17.2%, the twelfth most restricted of the hundred and one networks we have measured in this state. A further 31 are coded posted for load, and the two counts agreeing that closely is the ordinary pattern here.

The nearest of them is 1.46 miles from the gate. The tightest crossing a loaded truck could use is rated about 17.0 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck, which admits roughly four and a half tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare. Partial loading is not an occasional thing on this network; it is how the work is done.

Those figures are the Blue Ridge’s rather than this quarry’s alone.

Across the twenty Blue Ridge rows measured, 498 of 3,586 nearby structures are rated below legal loads, 13.9%, with a median cap admitting about 4.4 tonnes; across the twenty-eight Piedmont rows the same figures are 3.8% and about 8.9. So an operator up here meets a restricted crossing 3.7 times as often — 17.2% on this particular network — and carries about half as much across it. The rock is the crystalline granite, gneiss, amphibolite and mica-schist of the Appalachian core, the markets are small and separated, and the building season shuts for months of winter — so the hours came in bursts, on grades, with brakes, cooling and driveline taking more of the wear than they would on the flat.

Ownership inverts up here too, and it changes what is worth asking. Thirteen operators hold those twenty mountain rows, eight of them single-market companies with one pit apiece, where two international producers hold nineteen of twenty in the crescent. So in the mountains the operator behind a machine tells us more about how it was kept than the site does — which is the opposite of the advice we would give a buyer two hours east.

None of that is written in the statute, which sets one ceiling for the whole state and on the open road is more generous 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.

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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the pit 2.28 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs down the river road. 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 has spent its life on grades and part loads. How does that read?Honestly, and we would rather you told us. Brakes, cooling and driveline carry the wear up here, and with 30 of the 174 crossings within ten miles rated below legal loads — the nearest 1.46 miles from the gate — a truck out of this valley was rarely loaded to the ceiling. That is a maintenance question, not a disqualifier.
• Who ran it before matters more in the mountains, doesn’t it?It does, as background. Thirteen operators hold the twenty Blue Ridge rows we measured and eight of them have a single pit, so there is no national standard to compare against — the machine in front of us is the evidence. It changes nothing about whether we buy it.
• 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.

Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 2.28 miles out or a crossing 1.46 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.