We buy trucks in Raleigh

The stone here is Piedmont rock — granite, gneiss and diabase — worked at the margins of the Durham Triassic basin. Crabtree Quarry records 22 employees with the federal mine regulator and Triangle Quarry records 27. Triangle is held by Wake Stone Corporation, and it is the only operator on these rows that isn’t a national or international producer.

That distinction tells a buyer more than it looks like it does. A national producer specifies its plant to a standard somebody may have seen in another state; a single-market company doesn’t, so its machines are comparable only against each other.

The rail rows are shorter on detail. Glenwood sits 2.09 miles from the city centroid under Norfolk Southern, and the yard recorded simply as Raleigh sits 2.54 miles out under CSX Transportation. What either of them handles could not be determined from any source read for this batch, so this page doesn’t say.

That third row, Franklin Quarry, is filed to Raleigh in our data and it is 18.45 miles away, in Franklin County. The county field and the coordinate agree with each other; the city label is the part that is wrong, and it names the larger town rather than the location. It records three employees, which is a site registration and not a workforce.

It earns a place on this page anyway, because of where it sits. The pit is at or near the fall line, the seam where the Piedmont’s crystalline rock ends and the coastal plain’s sediments begin. East of that line the rock is under sediment, and there are no crushed-stone quarries in our list at all.

So the market runs east into country with no stone of its own, and the loaded leg and the empty leg are not the same length. How far the loads actually travel is not something we have data for and we don’t claim it. The geology, and an empty map east of here, are what is established.

Those three pits work three different road networks, and they separate cleanly.

Those caps are gross-weight ratings for the crossing, not payload figures. A legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty US tons, so a crossing rated at 29 takes it only part loaded. What the table does not say is how often one of them falls on a route anybody actually drives — that depends on where the loads go, and it is not in the data. Nine restricted crossings out of 438, with the nearest nearly two miles out, is a thin scatter to plan around.

The other thing shaping a truck here is the traffic it sits in. That produces duty-cycle wear rather than engine wear — brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres — on a machine that gathered its hours evenly, because a growing metro builds all year rather than in a season. It is a different profile from a truck that ran long and flat, and it is not a worse one.

One thing to notice about every figure above: none of them has a county number in it. North Carolina maintains no county bridges at all. The state took over the county road systems in the 1930s and never handed them back, so of 19,343 structures in the federal inventory here, 17,871 are state-maintained and not one is county-maintained.

Those crossings sit under a statute that is more generous on the open road 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.

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.

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 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Crabtree Quarry and Triangle Quarry. Day cabs and road tractors working the two yards, 2.09 and 2.54 miles out under Norfolk Southern and CSX. Box trucks, 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.

• 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’s a quarry truck with low miles and hard hours. Still interested?Yes. Short repeated hauls into Raleigh traffic put the wear in the brakes, clutch and suspension before the engine, and that is the ordinary shape of a truck here. Tell us the hours if you have them.
• How far out do you come?Across Wake County and out over the Franklin County line. Distance has never stopped a sale, and it need not be a visit at all — we buy remotely and arrange the tow where that suits better.

Those are the questions. Behind them the reasons are usually simpler than the truck, and they do not vary much between a Wake County yard inside the beltway and a pit out at the Franklin County line.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes it is only that the truck has been sitting since the last job, 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.