We buy trucks in Stokes

The only row attached here is a rail yard recorded as Greenville Yard, with CSX Transportation as its operator, and its coordinate lies 5.39 miles from the centroid of Stokes.

That is worth unpicking rather than glossing. The row is named for Greenville and reached this place by nearest-centroid fallback at 5.39 miles — the longest attachment of its batch — and its coordinate sits in no incorporated place at all. So the yard is not in this town; it is the nearest place our data could attach it to.

What moves through it could not be determined from any source read for the batch, so no commodity is named here. And the coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point, as it is on all 2,459 rail-yard rows we hold. Two soft numbers in one row is a good reason to lean on the rules rather than the location.

Those hold wherever the truck actually sits, which is the useful thing about them.

The road question has an unusual answer in this state: no county 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 handed them back — and 9.3% of the state-maintained ones are rated below legal loads.

The weight question is written down too, and this state is more generous than most on one figure. Gross is capped at 80,000 lb and the tandem axle at 38,000, four thousand pounds above what every other state we have read allows, and the ten per cent tolerance under it reaches the axle-group table and nothing else — not the single axle, not the tandem, not the gross, and not by administrative grant.

Those are the ceilings in full, and what the tolerance does not reach is written into the same section.

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 beats papering over them: bridge postings, light-traffic road designations, seasonal restrictions, the lien clock, lien release, plate return and notice of transfer, 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 whatever runs pass through. 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 5.39 miles away happens to sit.

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.
• That yard is not really here, is it?No, and we would rather say so. It is named for Greenville, its coordinate is in no incorporated place, and it was attached to this town because this was the nearest centroid at 5.39 miles. Where your truck is parked is a fact we can rely on instead.
• Do you know what the railroad handles?No, and we will not guess. The commodities at that yard could not be determined from anything we read for the batch, and what your truck loads under is the same 80,000 lb ceiling either way.
• 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 yard 5.39 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.