We buy trucks in Catawba

One rail-yard row is attached here. Bowater is recorded under CSX Transportation, 0.52 miles from the town centroid, and its coordinate falls inside the place rather than being reached from outside by nearest-centroid fallback.

That sounds like the ordinary case and it is not. Across this lane most rail rows are attached from outside the town they are filed under — some from 3.43 miles, some from 7.89 miles — because their coordinates land in no incorporated place at all. This one is genuinely local.

What moves through it could not be determined from any source read for the batch, and it does not get a commodity here on the strength of a name.

City-pages node list, rail-yard rows; U.S. Census 2024 Gazetteer, South Carolina places.

That 0.52 miles is worth one qualification before anyone paces it out. Every one of the 2,459 rail-yard rows in this dataset is recorded as the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than as a surveyed facility point, so a yard is placed where its track averages out and not where its gate is. The radius of 75 miles attached to each row is a constant applied across the whole set and flagged as estimated, not a measurement of this one.

So a yard sitting 0.52 miles from a centroid is a statement about where its track averages out, and the radius of 75 miles attached to the row says nothing about this yard at all. Both figures are useful and neither is a survey.

None of which changes anything about selling a truck. It is set out because a page that prints a number to two decimal places owes you the accuracy that number actually has.

City-pages node list, rail-yard rows; U.S. Census 2024 Gazetteer, South Carolina places.

That is the record; the statute is firmer ground. S.C. Code § 56-5-4140 sets a single axle at 20,000 pounds and two axles four to seven feet apart at 35,200, both written as including all enforcement tolerances, with 80,000 pounds gross on the interstate.

§ 56-5-4160 carries a general ten per cent enforcement tolerance applying to those limits — not a commodity permit, and it excludes no particular trade. But the axle figures are printed as already including tolerance, so the relief lands on the gross rather than on the axle.

Unprocessed forest products draw fifteen per cent instead, on non-interstate routes only. The axle-spacing relief covers dump trucks, dump trailers, trucks carrying agricultural products, concrete mixing trucks, fuel oil trucks and line trucks, at 20,000 pounds per axle plus scale tolerances.

What was not established: the general gross and axle schedule off the interstate, seasonal restrictions, whether a posted-bridge list is published, and the bridge layer here, which was not searched. That absence is a gap rather than a finding.

S.C. Code § 56-5-4140 and § 56-5-4160. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is that one sentence. Everything after it is a fix rather than a category: a lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.

§ 56-19-480 sets salvage at repair cost — parts and reasonable market charges for labour — reaching seventy-five per cent of the truck’s market value immediately before the damage, and makes salvage and total loss the same term with no age limb at all. § 56-19-485 brands the cause as well as the fact: salvage rebuilt, salvage flood rebuilt, or salvage fire rebuilt.

The rebuilt inspection is discretionary — the department may require one by the Highway Patrol rather than always requiring it — and the application asks for the source of the parts used and what they cost.

The lien clock and the lien release, plate return on a sale, and apportioned registration were not established for South Carolina, and nothing is written here about them.

S.C. Code § 56-19-480 and § 56-19-485. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, log trucks and timber rigs, flatbeds and rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the pickups and work trucks that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a rail-served thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The yard 0.52 miles from the middle of town, and the roads out past it well beyond the 75 miles of radius the record attaches to the row, are all inside where we work.

• 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 out 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. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
• It is parked on a track, not on a road. Can you still collect it?Yes. Tell us where it actually stands and whether it moves under its own power, and that decides whether somebody drives it out, tows it, or whether we buy it remotely and arrange the tow.
• Do you come out here?Yes — the town, the yard 0.52 miles from the middle of it, and the roads out past both. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around the yard 0.52 miles from the middle of town, and out along the roads well past the 75 miles the record nominally attaches to it, the same trucks come up for sale for the same reasons.

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.