We buy trucks in Oriental

The single record filed against this place is Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, and its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Carteret County. The row is attached to this town by name; the point it carries is some way off, on the other side of the sound.

Beyond that the row is thin. Acreage, strength and mission were not established, and it carries no freight information at all — no commodities, no traffic, no gate count. A station of that size plainly generates truck movements and we are not going to describe them, because describing them would mean inventing them.

Nor do we have a ten-mile bridge count for this page, because those are computed around quarry coordinates and no quarry row is filed nearby. That is a gap in what we looked up rather than a claim about the roads.

That leaves the rules, and two of them are worth having in a place laid out like this one.

The first is who owns the road. 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 and never gave them back. Of the state-maintained ones, 9.3% are rated below legal loads. So a posting near you here is the state’s doing, and there is no county system behind it.

The second is that the coastal plain carries the mildest caps in the state on the rows we have measured — 4.5% of nearby structures restricted against 15.0% in the mountains. None of that is a measurement of the roads around Oriental in particular, and this page will not pretend it is. It is the floor, and a page with one thin row is better standing on a measured floor than on a guess.

What governs a truck here is the state statute, and it governs every road on this side of the water the same way.

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.

It carries an agricultural exemption with a distance on it, which is worth knowing on a working coast. 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 limitations within 150 miles of the point of origination.

And 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.

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 established for this row, and naming them beats implying the picture is complete: how a vehicle six model years old or newer is treated on the retitling side, seasonal restrictions, the posted-bridge list, the lien clock, plate return, apportioned registration and the emissions programme. 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 long runs inland. 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, whichever side of Carteret County the work is on.

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.
• We are a fair way from anywhere. Does that put you off?No, and it usually settles how this goes: the ordinary version out here is that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody making the drive. If you would rather see a person, we come to you and drive it away or come to you and tow it.
• Do you know the roads round here?Not at street level, and we would rather say so. There is no quarry row nearby, so we have no ten-mile bridge count for this page. What we know is statewide: every road here is state-maintained and 9.3% of state-maintained structures are rated below legal loads.
• It hauls for a farm in season. Does that change the weights?On the road it can. Agriculture, dairy and crop products moving from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market sit outside the weight limitations within 150 miles of where the load started. It has no bearing on selling the truck.

Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a thin row in Carteret County 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.