We buy trucks in Morehead City

The only row attached to this place is the Morehead City rail yard, recorded with the Carolina Coastal Railway as its operator. Its coordinate lies 2.21 miles from the centroid of the town, and it is the sole rail-yard row filed against Morehead City in our list.

What moves through it we cannot tell you. The commodities handled at that yard could not be determined from any source read for the batch, so this page asserts none — not a commodity, not a volume, not a customer.

The location is solid, though, and worth explaining. The row was attached to this town by nearest-centroid fallback rather than by a direct name match, and the coordinate falls inside the town anyway: the name, the attachment and the containing place all agree, and only the method differs. Rail-yard coordinates in this data are the mean of a track polyline’s vertices, the same derivation used for all 2,459 rail-yard rows, so 2.21 miles is a fix on a yard rather than a pin on a gate.

That leaves the rules a truck works under here, and one of them is written for places like this one.

North Carolina maintains a class of light-traffic roads with limitations of their own, and it exempts from those limitations a vehicle carrying supplies, material or equipment necessary to a farming operation producing meat, crops, livestock or poultry by-products, or to a business harvesting or processing seafood, where the destination of the vehicle and its load is solely on a light-traffic road. Which roads carry that designation was not determined for this batch, so no road-class figure is written here for anywhere near the yard 2.21 miles from the middle of town.

The other thing that holds everywhere is who owns the road: no county in this state maintains a bridge. 92.4% of the structures in the federal inventory are state-maintained and none is county-maintained, because the state took over the county road systems in the 1930s and never handed them back — and 9.3% of the state-maintained ones are rated below legal loads. On the coastal plain generally the caps are the mildest in the state, with 4.5% of nearby structures restricted against 15.0% in the mountains.

Those roads carry one weight statute, and on the open road it 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.

The six-year line does one more thing here worth spelling out: it decides whether an inspection happens at all. A vehicle up to and including six model years old being retitled after damage goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Enforcement Section of the Division. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection. The seventy-five per cent test applies at every age either way.

Some things were not settled for this row and naming them beats papering over them: the posted-bridge list, which roads are light-traffic, seasonal restrictions, the lien clock, plate return, apportioned registration and the emissions programme. None is established as absent. What is established is that North Carolina has not adopted Advanced Clean Trucks.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the runs to the port and back. 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, wherever the yard 2.21 miles away sends them.

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 seafood and farm work as well as freight. Does that change the weights?On a light-traffic road it can. The statute exempts a vehicle carrying supplies, material or equipment necessary to a seafood or farming business from those roads’ limitations where the destination is solely on such a road. Which roads those are was not determined for this batch, so we will not tell you which ones near you qualify.
• What went through the rail yard? Would that tell you anything about my truck?It would, and we do not know it — the commodities at that yard could not be determined from anything we read, and we would rather say so than invent a trade for the town. Your truck we can read directly.
• 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 rail yard 2.21 miles away or an 80,000 lb ceiling.

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.