We buy trucks in Reidsville

The row filed here is Reidsville Quarry, with 17 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 3.75 miles from the centroid of Reidsville city.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 131 structures. 13 are coded posted for load and 15 are rated below legal loads — the two fields disagreeing by two, which is the ordinary pattern in this state, where the below-legal count slightly exceeds the posted one statewide as well. We report the below-legal figure, so 15 in 131, or 11.5%.

The nearest of them is 2.58 miles from the gate, and the tightest a loaded truck could use is rated about 24.9 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck — room for eleven and a half tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, which is generous for a network this restricted.

That combination is what the counties along the Virginia line look like.

The tier — Caswell, Rockingham, Person, Granville, Vance and Durham — runs 68 of 660 nearby structures below legal loads, 10.3%, with a median cap admitting about 7.6 tonnes of stone. The coastal plain edge fifty miles south runs 5.0% and the central Piedmont 4.0%. So the tier is twice as restricted as the counties below it, and as restricted as the western Piedmont three hundred miles away.

This row is a little above the tier on the count, at 11.5%, and half again above it on the cap. What that describes is an operator working flat, open country on a route map with more soft crossings than the geography suggests — western numbers on an eastern landscape. We take it as background on how a machine was worked rather than as a verdict on any one truck.

Above all of it sits one 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.

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 3.75 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs up to the line and back. 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.
• Two lists of posted bridges say different things. Which is right?Both, and they are counting different fields. Within ten miles of this pit 13 structures are coded posted for load and 15 are rated below legal loads; the fields are independent codings and they agree closely in this state. We use the below-legal figure because it is the one about what a crossing will actually carry.
• It ran up over the Virginia line most weeks. Does that matter?Not to the sale. Where a truck worked has no bearing on the paperwork; the title does. It does explain a route map with more restricted crossings on it than flat country usually has — 11.5% here against 4.0% in the central Piedmont.
• 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 3.75 miles out or a crossing 2.58 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.