We buy trucks in Navassa

The only row attached to this place is the Davis rail yard, recorded with CSX Transportation as its operator, and its coordinate lies 1.70 miles from the centroid — inside the place rather than out in the county.

That operator is worth a note. Most of the rail-yard rows we hold in small places belong to short lines; this one belongs to one of the six North American Class I railroads, which is a different scale of operation on the same map. What it does not tell us is what moves through the yard, and the commodities there could not be determined from any source read for the batch. So this page names none.

As with every rail-yard row we hold, the coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point — the same derivation on all 2,459 of them. So 1.70 miles locates a yard, not a gate, and we would rather say which kind of number it is than let it read as more precise than it is.

Those are the limits of the row, and the roads are where this page can be more definite.

No county in North Carolina maintains a bridge: 92.4% of the structures in the federal inventory are state-maintained and none is county-maintained, because the state took the county road systems over in the 1930s. So a posting round here comes from the state, and 9.3% of the state-maintained structures carry one.

What this page does not have is a ten-mile bridge count, because those are computed around quarry coordinates and the row filed here is a rail yard. That is an absence in what we looked up rather than a claim that the roads are clear, and on the coastal plain generally the caps are the mildest in the state — 4.5% of nearby structures restricted against 15.0% in the mountains, measured around quarry rows rather than around the yard 1.70 miles from the middle of town.

Whatever the local roads do, one statute sets the ceiling, 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.

Some things were not settled for this row, and naming them is better than implying the picture is complete: bridge postings, light-traffic road designations, seasonal restrictions, the lien clock, plate return and notice of transfer, apportioned registration and the emissions programme. None of them 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 down the river and up the highway. 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 past the yard 1.70 miles from the middle of town.

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 port and yard work rather than long haul. Does that matter?Only in what we look at first. Short shunting work puts hours and clutch wear on a machine without putting miles on it, so the odometer tells you less than usual. We would rather see it than read it.
• Is there a bridge round here that will not take a loaded truck?We cannot tell you from this row, and we will not pretend. The ten-mile counts we publish are computed around quarry coordinates and there is no quarry row filed here. What we can say is that every road here is state-maintained, that 9.3% of state-maintained structures in this state are rated below legal loads, and that the yard our row describes is 1.70 miles from the middle of town.
• 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 1.70 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.